sp3ctr4l

A whole lot of poorly configured or cheaply made electroninc appliances or chargers … yeah I can often literally hear when you’ve plugged something in wrong, it makes a high pitched whine, because it is overamping.

Also, if you’re near high tension power lines?

You have to be pretty darn close to be in danger from actual electromagnetic effects.

But… that hum? The buzz?

Turns out that that is actually what causes a lot of long term health problems in people sensitive to it.

Literally the sound, not the EM field, makes you agitated, stressed, on edge, and if that is just your baseline for 20 years, that constant stress accumulates and basically ages you faster, and can cause mental health problems.

Well I’m glad you have/had a supportive family instead of a dysfunctional awful one like me.

I’ve been forced through an ever evolving series of mental health diagnoses by my family until after 20 years of the wrong meds for misdiagnosis… yeah turns out I am autistic and have ptsd/cptsd from my insanely narcissistic and manipulative and mentally unstable family.

Turns out once I get the fuck away from them, I can actually manage fairly well on my own. Oh and theres the whole got two bachelors degrees simultaneously and am very good at a multitude of tech/programming/db admin/data analysis type stuff, and I was making more money than my entire immediate family combined until their most recent attempt to declare me insane for disagreeing with their (objectively wrong) econonomic and political opinions (my degreees are in econ and poli sci, none of them have any degrees).

… Anyway, there’s much more to an autism diagnosis than just the heightened hearing/seeing/touch sensations, but that is a fairly significant component of it.

There are some decent, long form, like 200+ question tests you can take online from actual medically endorsed autism awareness organizations… if you think you may actually have it, take one of those and then take your results to a psychologist.

I used to be able to do this as well until I got into my 30s and my vision naturally degraded.

Was quite good at FPS games, paintballing… the first time I went to a rifle range for an introductory shooting class, the instructor suggested i look into a shooting scholarship due to my exceptional fine motor control and visual acuity… I had very fast reaction times in martial arts (Karate), but being naturally timid and having a skinny twink build kind of cancelled that out.

The reality is most people think you are delusional, and if your family/friends are authoritarian, they’ll try to get you mentally evaluated as seeing hallucinations.

Its less Superman and more Xmen being persecuted for being different.

I too have significantly more sensitive hearing than seemingly just most people, and can hear and often get annoyed by high pitched but low decibel sounds, very often caused by electronics, off balance high speed fans, etc.

Got gaslit about it by my family as well.

You may wanna look into an autism diagnosis, autists often have this kind of thing going on.

You’d think it would be called super hearing, but instead its often everyone without heigtened senses calling you delusional.

Same thing happened to me when I described seeing the entoptic blue field phenomenon to my family, but not knowing the fancy name for it because I was 11. Family got very concerned I was hallucinating, the reality is I am just more attentive to reality than they are.

For what its worth, CyberPunk 2077 is … an alt history that diverges from our own … at some point in the 1960s I think?

Like… the Soviet Union still exists. In 2077.

Point being: The ‘Japanese megacorps taking over much of the American economy’ fear of our own 1980s is very, very much a big part of the lore/universe.

Pondsmith published the first version of the lore in 1988 as the TTRPG ‘Cyberpunk’, originally set in 2013, and this kept getting added to and expanded with subsequent editions.

Arasaka is… well hopefully without spoiling too much, Arasaka corp is basically run by a Japanese fighter pilot ace who pretty much swore eternal vengeance on America after Japan got nuked and lost the war, and his idea of how to do this includes figuring out how to become immortal, so that he can continue to run a megacorp that ultimately usurps American sovereignty and turns the country into his neo-corpo-feudal subjects.

You can get almost all of that by playing through the Corpo intro character path and actually watching the informative slideshow thing in the elevator and on walls/screens in the … megalobby, so hopefully thats not too spoilery.

Also in Die Hard it is Nakatomi Plaza iirc, Nakatomi being the name of the fictional Japanese corp.

Anyway woo random trivia.

Yeah, asterisk to indicate multiplication is much, much more common amongst coders.

… And script kiddie DOGE interns.

Platitudes do protect the poor from thugs if platitudes are embodied by people of courage and moral character willing to meaningfully advocate for them and protect them with force if necessary.

If your society does not do this, your society is of low moral character.

Actually acting in line with your expressed morality is the bare minimum, first threshold of your supposed, proclaimed, performed morals being… things you are actually willing to promote in the world.

If your morals do not actually guide your actions, you are merely cosplaying them, and are just a pedantic preening poser… with low moral character.

Socrates disagreed with the reasoning behind his assigned fate, but accepted it nonetheless, in accordance with his conviction to his principles.

A morality that is not built on responsibility and duty to others is no morality at all.

How to actually do games preservation:

Reform IP laws.

Mandate open sourcing of hardware and software architectures after some period of time. 10 years? 5 years after no more of that hardware/software is sold? Yes texhnicalities are insanely complicated but you get the idea.

Oh, how about government funding for emulator development? We fund libraries that preserve books, and movies, and other stuff.

I hope youre right.

In my lived experience… no, it is not.

90% of poor or moderately well off people I’ve known will still argue for supply side Jesus right up untill the moment their worldview is actually applied to them personally.

EDIT: And then the 10% that do agree with that idea theoretically, well they absolutely never apply it personally, in their own lives, amongst people they know personally.

A society’s moral character is best judged by how it treats its least, not by how it treats the average, or median, or best.

I prefer a good, old fashioned, no bo-shit, big stick.

I mean … sai … its not like everyone has finely crafted throwing stars lying around, but kama(n) farming tools?

Much more practical.

((Apologies for the rough final pun, doing my best lol.))

Hit detection doesn’t work, going into pure darkness makes the AI hallucinate to the point it distorts the map layout, npcs will teleport around ot just disappear… runs at like 640p at maybe 20 fps, textures are a blurred indistinct mess…

Oh and it requires basically a super computer to run this.

Brilliant.

Gaming has not been ‘fine’ since:

Hypercaptialist corporate acquisitions have basically bought all recognizable IP/dev studios and manage them under an increasingly smaller number of actual parent companies who own increasingly huge numbers of IPs/dev studios, and then basically all of these companies are absurdly mismanaged by corporate nonces who make bank, and game devs are routinely overworked and underpaid.

MTX became the new norm / the mobile gaming scene exploded (basically concurrent phenomena)

Nvidia/Unreal decided that actually, having efficiently coded lighting that runs on moderately priced hardware is stupid, what you actually want is horrifically inefficient lighting that runs on absurdly expensive hardware, and then Nvidia plasters a bunch of AI Frame Gen/Upscale all over that foundation to further enforce their monopoly.

… Like, yes, there are still great indie or AA games, but those are the exception to the rule.

The overall industry is a fucking nightmare for anyone who works in it, and from the consumer perspective, we keep getting overpriced, overproduced iterations of the same basic game… sandwiched on the other side by an avalanche of garbage tier indie slop/scams. Something like 80 to 90 % of the games listed on Steam are that, and they are constantly fucking with their algorithms to be able to actually detect them and filter them.

… It also doesn’t even matter if you personally will never own a high end gaming PC.

All the AAA game dev studios need them to develop the games. And now those are all 30% more expensive, at least. Oh and all of the employees cost of living just jumped 30% as well, I am totally sure that their wages will increase to compensate this. Oh wait no, they’ll actually lay them off even faster and exploit them even harder.

Game dev in America is going to largely grind to a halt, with again, the exception of a few, now even smaller in number, amount of new games that can be developed with much less powerful hardware, or an even smaller number of AAA titles that quintuple down on MTX, addiction based pricing models.

But uh hey, basically every other industry in America is utterly fucked too.

Leisure/luxury expenditures crater the hardest during a depression. Which is what we are looking at. Not a recession for a year or two, no, this is a gonna be a decade of you learning how to cook with rice and beans, sewing your clothes back together because you can’t buy new ones, where your Xmas gift to your kid is decent shoes, not a game console.

… Can the replicator produce a cubic meter of this?

Not a VPN, but you may also want to look into I2P.

https://i2pd.website/

https://proprivacy.com/privacy-service/guides/i2p-guide

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FNp0TRDG0BQ

Basically, a p2p protocol for the entire internet.

Its considerably more complicated to set up than most modern VPNs, where nowaday’s its usually as simple as install an app with a GUI, verify some settings and you’re good to go, and i2p is also quite slow…

… but its totally free, and you can torrent over it, and as far as I know, if you’ve set it up properly, it is basically undetectable by ISPs, due to how it uses ‘garlic’ routing: basically, a whole bunch of users net requests are encrypted, anonymized, and then smashed into a big packet… so an ISP would have to untangle all of that for every packet, and afaik, none of them have figured out how.

I2P would obviously be horrible for watching streaming content though, snail speed.

Its actually perfect. No notes. No possible improvements.

This deserves some kind of award.

I think I agree with you but maybe didn’t explain my stance so well.

Putin and his immediate orbit are … largely, but not entirely, successfully creating a hyperreality for everyone else to live in and experience, they purposefully engage in it as an intentional tactic, to sow confusion and chaos around everything, and then at least project into that chaos that they are stability.

Trump and his immediate circle… are too fucking incompotent to engage in creating a hyperreality as an intentional tactic… in the sense that they actually believe in half of the insane bullshit they throw out into the world, and they are not actually capable of projecting themselves as that island of stability.

Putin and co largely do not live in the hyperreality they create, at least not anywhere near to the extent Trump and co do.

Putin usually knows when he’s lying or promoting an utterly dubious notion.

Of course there are some utter nonsense ideas that Putin seems to truly believe, what with his personal idea of how Russo/Slavic history, and identity actually work, and his initial vast overestimation of the capability of the Russian military.

But Trump… doesn’t even know enough, in most instances, to even know if he is intentionally lying or not.

Trump himself is to a much greater extent, completely lost in the hyperreality he initially created, and can no longer wield it as a political/psychological weapon/tactic with intentionality.

To torture a metaphor:

Trump is lost in the sauce, utterly drowning in it, Putin just has a daily foot bath in the sauce.

My only income is Social Security Disability Income.

I am quite literally having a call with a pro bono lawyer from a non profit law firm that specializes in Social Security matters in a few hours, after having gone through their application process last week.

I am just trying to pre emptively set myself for at least some kind of legal counsel… as it now seems inevitable that I will need one, given the insanity going at Social Security, thanks to Musk and DOGE not being able to understand how any of their databases work, and taking a hatchet to staff headcount and shutting down Soc Sec physical locations.

Its hyperreality, as Adam Curtis shows in his documentary mostly focusing on Putin… but the Trump admin is actually too stupid to realize … that that is what it is, they fell for their own bs, sheltered and curated worldviews because they are so, so skilled at (really, privileged enough to be able to) surrounding themselves with yes men and sycophants and cult members.

I mean, a big element of it is falling for much of Putin’s actually intentionally constructed hyperreality… but the Trump admin and MAGA people are actually too stupid to even been correctly just… generally cynical, and the result is honestly more akin to a 1944/45 Nazi movement that has leaders and followers mostly just still in denial/cognitive dissonance and grandiose cult like faith at the same time.

But the MAGA hyperreality … isn’t centrally planned or directed. Its … basically an accidental consensus of a bunch of idiots screaming different kinds of idiocy into the void loud enough, and the kinda sorta generally agreed on hyperreality is whatever ends up echoing the loudest and most clearly.

They can’t even project stability or competency, even as hollow suits, even as a false but semi-convincing front.

Just go look at the last two weeks ish of public appearances of Trump and his cabinet and Elon.

Half of them are having emotional breakdowns, manic episodes live on air, Hohman, whatever, the DHS goon leading deportations… either he was fucking drunk, or his dentures were falling out of his mouth, a reporter/news host asks him a question and he gives like a 75 word rambling response, maybe 10 of the words actually intelligible.

The inmates are running the asylum.

… Oh well, at least I’ve personally passed through the intense despair and depression phase of knowing this was coming, and am now just laughing at how truly stupid and farsical this all is, and how it is honestly, precisely what Americans deserve for either being idiot cult members, apathetic, or placing their faith in an utterly incompetent Democratic party that just still thinks its 1992, or squabbling over inane idpol differences.

We are apparently actually so stupid, irresponsible and/or more concerned with petty nonsense issues that we are just actually going to have to go through the fire of either overthrowing these malevolent morons, or just acquiesce to all becoming true debt serfs and burn to a crisp.

I’ve been saying that Trump and his ‘ideas’ on tariffs are just… completely, fundamentally broken and self contradictory, at every possible level.

He literally just doesn’t get it, he doesn’t grasp what you’d be taught in AP Macroecon or a first quarter of Macroecon at a college or uni.

Yes, of course, more competent oligarchs can profit from an engineered economic collapse…

But Trump and his immediate orbit are literally too stupid to understand why what they are doing won’t work the way they think it will.

These idiots are very largely at the peak of the dunning kruger confidence vs actual knowledge curve, right before you fall off into the abyss of ‘oh shit this is actually really conplicated and i am a moron.’

Of course, they’ll never admit they are morons or were ever wrong, they’ll just keep lying, misdirecting, and inventing new insane conspiracy theories with secret enemies thaf explain why they failed