I think it was the illness. Even without the illness based on the first games ending and the fact that Arthur was not mentioned or existed within it I was pretty sure I knew how rdr2 was going to end before I started but the illness gave it such a somber tone. Arthur recognized his mortality and really started to reflect.

It’s been ages since I played rdr1 but as far as I remember John was more “I’m doing this to be done, for my family!”. The tone was much lighter as a result even though there were moments that were heavy. And the characters weren’t as developed so I didn’t care as much. Dutch was just a fucking monster in that game, bill and Javier were just props. But rdr2 fleshed them all out so much

I mean it is an era where up and moving 100 miles basically meant you started your life over. But that was kind of the plot: they were a gang of that era where they could run in a town, wreak havoc, disappear, and the infrastructure didn’t yet exist to reliably track them across the gigantic land mass that is North america.

But by the time the game rolls around the beginnings of the modern federal government are happening and agencies to track people like them across the country are in full swing. So all of a sudden their way of life is coming to a close, quickly. Instead of just some pissing off a sheriff in a town and never being able to go back there, occasionally having a bounty hunter after you, you now have a huge team of people with the resources of a government coming for you.

I think part of it that’s understated is the size of the map. The map is obviously big for a game but it’s supposed to be a huge chunk of America. When you compare the geography of the map to America it’s somewhat clear that it’s supposed to be a gigantic swath of America, from like Montana down to Louisiana and across to Texas. You can ride across the map in 20 min but obviously this would take months irl. Obviously this is about gameplay balance but as a result you lose the sense that Arthur is going extremely far away when he’s going from valentine to st denis, when in reality that would be like a month of riding and crossing several states. Even if he did a genocide that would probably shake the heat for a little while back then

They did obviously play it up of course. If you literally murdered everyone in a town back then there would probably be more of a response from the surrounding towns to find you. But gamers like violence and it’s again about balancing gameplay vs authenticity. usually gameplay wins because otherwise you end up with a boring game

I remember so many people being furious at rockstar for not releasing dlc on the scope of gta4 but honestly with this game I don’t know what form that narrative would take that could be satisfying.

The main narrative is concluded decisively obviously. It’s a prequel so continuing with John would just be rdr1. Another undead nightmare is eh, zombies are so played out. I guess you could fill in what went on with Dutch or some of the others that show up in rdr1 but frankly I don’t really want to play as them. I suppose you could intro some new character that’s part of their new gang. I dunno. I get why they didn’t prioritize it (well that and more so that dlc costs a ton to develop for a pitiful return relative to something like gta online, which is kind of sad)

This is not surprising at all, this is exactly what he did in the aftermath of Samoa. Instead of taking any accountability or reflecting on his actions for murdering 80+ children he blamed the populace for being malnourished and accepting vaccines (that’s why they died, of course) and then peddled this exact rhetoric word for word

this made my cat freak the fuck out

Depends on budget and storage options

That’s not much data

Listed in order:

Encrypted nas. For that small amount of data raid 1. A shitty e waste pc would suffice. A ups would be ideal. This is least ideal honestly as it requires power, a maintainer, and isnt truly backup

SSD of some kind, even a usb stick Enterprise hard drive like wd gold or ironwolf pro Redundant copies, 2-3 ideally, store in various cool dry locations

LTO tape - far more resilient than hard drives and cost effective per tb but downside is that you need a very expensive ($3-5000) tape drive to utilize them, also very slow to read/write, older/cheaper tape formats (I believe pre lto8?) don’t have the ability to act as an external disk where you can just drag and drop files and are more of a pain to use

Blu-ray M-DISK. Upside for these are that they are very resilient, can be stored basically anywhere assuming you put them in a sealed container, and will last many many years (probably longer than you’ll be alive). Downside is that storage per disk is very low (100gb), cost per disk is high, and write speed is low. so you will need ~ 50 for 5tb of data, each disk is about $25 (so $1225 though tbf there’s probably bulk pricing) and it would take 37.5 hours to burn them. But this would be the most resilient of all

Cloud storage - backblaze, tresorit, icedrive, etc

Hybrid solution - ideal scenario. Load a hard drive or two and lock them away somewhere. If you have access to a Blu-ray burner maybe burn a handful of m-disks of your most critical data (not all 5tb but the most important 1-200gb or so). If you can access a tape drive do that too. Ideally update the tape and hard drives monthly. Update the Blu-ray as needed. local nas and cloud for daily backups

Obviously encrypt your files. Veracrypt is a good solution in a political dissident situation - can create hidden volumes so that if you are caught you can give up passwords and reveal only the outer volume, keeping the inner volume hidden

I love this game. It has several drawbacks, some of the physics make things feel like you’re underwater the whole time, the wanted system can be extremely irritating at the worst moments, and for a game with a world that is extremely alive the missions are extremely on rails where often even doing something slightly off the developers intended path will fail you

But despite that I still love it. The game is gorgeous years later. They put so much effort into the world. It’s not just the graphics, it’s every detail that just makes it feel so alive. Walking around the town the npcs are so thought out, have so much dialogue. The animals too. I remember playing other open world games after and just noticing more so how lifeless they felt in comparison; that npcs would repeat dialogue after 2 or 3 lines, animals would run in circles, etc. and the story is great.

I hope that once gta6 is done they turn to rdr3. Its overall a much better series with a stronger narrative, better characters, etc. with red dead they seem to not be as overly concerned with shitting it up with online bullshit and microtransactions though so the series might be done for

AI upscale generally gives a perceived improved fidelity at a loss of some finer detail and grain. It is a trade off and it is almost never a objective improvement

And further he remained unrepentant for his role in murdering 83 Samoan children (most of which were babies). Instead deflecting blame onto the people of Samoa, saying it was because they were malnourished, or possibly because they had the audacity to get vaccinated during an epidemic that he had a direct role in causing (and thus the vaccines killed the unvaccinated children who died of measles, somehow)

My basic math skills have been terrible lately. I made a basic math error in a post the other day too. I was a strong student in math too

Is this cognitive decline? I’m not even 40

Tech was ruined in the 90s when capitalistic influences (microsoft being the dominant force but far from the only one) propagandized the industry and eventually populace at large with the idea that competition in the industry is what drives innovation.

Granted, much of their work was already done for them thanks to western influence perpetuating this ideal for ages. But when the frameworks for open standards, interoperability, and collaborative development were being proposed and put into place they were shot down and/or actively sabotaged

As a result 40 years later we have this mess. A landscape filled with nightmare tech. Fragmentation everywhere, design heavily influenced by a small handful of sociopaths with no empathy and active disdain for users, the idea of open standards is something that requires government intervention (and still rarely occurs), interoperability is something that has to be hacked around and frequently breaks as a means to encourage purchasing a competing product.

What could have been. Tech designed for people’s needs rather than tech designed to extract income

Then you won’t browse about 20% of the Internet, which doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s disproportionately impacting sites you would generally want to browse

I posted to this effect in a Firefox alternatives thread: if you use an alternative low adoption rate FOSS browser you trade increased privacy via less/no data harvesting for decreased privacy via much higher susceptibility to browser fingerprinting by google/meta/etc. doesn’t matter if you resize your windows if your browser reports its one that only 5,000 people use. And something tells me the tech giants have a way around user agent spoofing

And now even if you don’t care about that? Fuck you. Cloudflare locks you out of the modern internet because of course anyone not using chrome or safari is a bot

I have pretty draconian privacy protections on my devices and home network. It makes the internet hostile. Captchas regularly fail and I have to try them many times. Embedded youtube videos always think I am a bot and refuse to play unless I sign in, I get weird interstitial pages with captchas on google search, yandex, etc (kagi and searx don’t so I use searx), etc.

Advertisers have pushed companies to make the internet openly hostile to anyone who wants to maintain privacy. And to be clear google and meta are advertisers first and foremost. Fuck them

because you don’t own your device

https://libgen.li/torrents/

Anna’s archive, as mentioned

Libgen has academic papers, which is really important. I’m not aware of any torrents that back up scihub, this is the closest thing

Stuff like kiwix gives you offline backups of Wikipedia

Bga is more about skill than equipment. I’ve done it with a cheap hot air gun and a toaster oven. Though it took many failed attempts to get right

But this isn’t always about your phone being repairable by you. It’s about your phone being repairable at all. Apple, google, samsung, et al have made it clear that they have no interest in refurbishing and repairing phones. That’s fine, they have the right to do whatever I guess. And further, this creates a great opportunity for many people to create small businesses.

America has very few markets left wherein one can create a business that is not utterly dominated by some conglomerate that will eat your shit. This is one where you can do so, with honest work (eg not just buying shit from Chinese manufacturers and reselling it on amazon for a profit).

However, the tech industry is openly hostile to small business and its consumers, so every business that has worked in this sector has been either destroyed or hollowed out to barely anything by big techs greedy bullshit in the name of security.

This would enrich communities: you would have another possible route where someone local could open a business within the community, that would hire locally within the community. But apple, samsung, microsoft, etc lobby extremely hard to make sure that they never have to stop pairing parts, providing spare parts, providing schematics, etc. and of course they’re not being asked to do this for free. They’re being asked to do this for a fair and reasonable cost, but they still refuse.

Now designing phones with user replaceable wear items like batteries or even common failure points like screens is obviously a good idea as well in theory but comes with challenges. However the challenges are mixed. Batteries can be user replaceable in thin and waterproof phones. The galaxy s5 is almost as thin and almost as waterproof as the s23 and has a user replaceable battery. If more engineering effort was put forth I’m sure it could be greatly improved. The issue is design; they (especially apple) don’t want to disrupt their “beautiful”glass back phones that 99.9999% of people slap a case on. User replaceable screens are more challenging to make waterproof but I’m sure they could figure it out.

But if the above was addressed, they wouldn’t necessarily have to. We could go back to the days of going to a small store next to your grocery store and getting your phone screen changed out for $150 while you do your shopping. except much more money because an iphone 16 pro max oled is ~ $700 just for the screen, which brings up the other issue of people don’t want to repair stuff anymore because component cost is outrageous. The phone is $1200 for the base model so if the screen and labor is $800 a lot of people will (foolishly) go “well for $400 more I can just get a brand new one!” even though it’s the same damn phone. However, these screen prices fall dramatically when the phones get even a few gens older and a bunch get recycled

Thank you

Thank you

Thank you

I did mention qualified immunity

all I know is that I’ve worked in mental health for a long time and a great deal of that time was spent working in mobile crisis units. These worked closely with police, as at the time 988 didn’t exist so people called 911 during crisis. The police we worked with were overwhelmingly the most callous, cruel, and disgusting people I have ever come across in my life. News reports show that this is not a local issue but a national one.

I am not surprised by what happened to this man. This is a systemic issue. That is why I say the system of policing needs to be dismantled. The people involved are all either scumbags that get off on being cruel or people that are willing to turn a blind eye to such behavior.

Additionally I left that job because reporting police misbehavior to supervisors multiple times resulted in absolutely no consequences. I would not be surprised to find out if all of those cops still work there or are promoted to supervisory positions as it’s been like a decade. The rot is deep and the protections for their misbehavior run rampant

I work in gender affirming care that includes pediatric populations and have my services listed online for referrals. It’s not super common to be fair but every once in a while I get an email or voicemail that’s like “you’re a child abuser and you should die” or some shit. It’s why I specifically say voicemail; I don’t answer calls to my business phone bc of this. Everything gets screened and I call back. Thankfully it’s infrequent and this has been enough to ensure I never have to engage with these people.

You’re absolutely right though. I’ve posted about my work before and people will sometimes be like “thank you for doing what you do”. I appreciate that, and those comments outnumber these threats, which again are not very common, but they stick out. Even the ones that don’t wish me dead. Once I got an email that just said “f*g enabler”. I don’t know why I remember that. It was years ago.

It’s the knowledge that someone out there absolutely hates you and wants you to die without knowing anything (really) about who you are, I think.

The really sad part of this is that this is a core part of the minority stress model; that feeling constant oppression from the world around you is noxious and has measurable consequences on physical and mental health. If he and his dumb racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, etc cronies reflected on their experience and practiced empathy for even a moment they would realize that this stress is something experienced almost constantly by someone on their hit list, because of them.

Edit: while I appreciate the positivity I genuinely didn’t mean for this to be a “please give me positive support” thing. I dunno I always feel awkward posting about this because it’s like I’m fishing for compliments at the expense of one of the most marginalized communities out there. You don’t need to thank me, though I do appreciate it quite a bit