On a lark I bought small drone with the intention of taking pictures of my property looking for roof damage after storms: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B087TGVJYM This was about the cheapest one I could find that could take downward pictures.
It used my phone as the screen and generally flew well enough but I could never get it to idle without drifting. I crashed it several times while learning and messed up something so the downward pictures come out all wavy.
After watching a bunch of ukraine footage it seems like drone piloting would be a useful skill in my kit so I wanted to give it another try.
The biggest problem with my drone is that the video transmission range to my phone is really short, as in maybe 50 feet. I can still control it over a pretty long distance but without the video I feel like it isn't as good of an experience, and it requiers re-running the app to connect the video every time it disconnects which is kind of a buttpain.
What I'm looking for is ideally an FPV drone where the kit comes with goggles that don't require a phone connection and is ready to fly out of the box. I want at least say 300 feet of fpv range. I don't care about the best camera or longest battery life, if it gives me 15-20 minutes that is good enough. Ideally it would also have qol features like 1 button auto landing and be reasonably easy to adjust so I could get it to stay in place while idling.
Does anyone on this board know drones and can recommend a kit that doesn't cost an arm and leg?
edit: and while not required it would be nice to be able to take downward pictures
I picked up Phoenix Point because I was feeling that XCOM itch and knew if it wasn't this I would start a Long War game of XCOM2 which would probably take 2 years to finish if I did at all.
Far Cry 5 is $6 and though I'm not particularly tempted I've heard good things.
Mad Max is $2 and if you haven't played it I would say it most certainly a bargain at that price. It is fairly boilerplate open world where you take towers and bases to gather resources for upgrades and eventually unlock tougher and tougher zones. The vehicle combat is really the standout and your car is the star of the show. Just tearing around the desert is fun in itself. Taking caravans is particularly cinematic and satisfying to eventually bag one that you just weren't quite able to before your latest upgrade. Unfortunately the base assault and dismounted fighting is pretty forgettable with batman arkham-style auto-target with quicktime blocking that doesn't change very much as you unlock new abilities. My 2nd favorite open world game after shadow of mordor/war.
I bought it but got a refund. I was a huge fan of the first game and enjoyed CoP well enough, though it felt like a completely different game that only shared aesthetics with the SoC.
I think I played for about an hour and in that time it felt like I was being led by the nose through the "quests". I don't know if the world opened up after that a linear "curated" experience isn't what draws me to that game. The first anomaly you went through had an obvious path so you didn't have to throw bolts, (I'm not sure that was even in the game unless I just missed it).
I'm a tard who plays PC games with a controller and there didn't appear to be aim assist which I know is lame but is also standard at this point when you use a controller in FPS (or it is there and I just suck terribly). Also the inventory interface was rough with the controller with some seriously counter-intuitive control scheme decisions.
The game was pretty enough and ran fine but just felt kind of cheaply slapped together compared to the obviously lovingly crafted first one.
And really minor complaint that there was no Russian voice available. I know there us Ukranian voice and its close enough to Russian that it doesn't matter for atmosphere, but it feels unnecessarily petty considering you know everyone who worked on the game probably spoke both.
I recently took a chance on Redacted because I saw a youtube review and it looked like sci-fi Hades. And honestly the gameplay is fine but the announcer making already dated pop culture references and being unfunnily snarky turned me off so much that I refunded it at around 90 minutes in.
It basically is Hades some minor mechanics tweaks, slightly less open environments and a "rivals" mechanic that adds another layer of both strategy and randomness to each run.
I didn't hate it but nothing was so good that I didn't uninstall after the announcer said "this isn't barney the dinosaur" after I died to the level boss.
Game link here if anyone has a stronger stomach for that stuff than I do: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2229940/REDACTED/
I played the PC version.
tl;dr fun enough but nothing outstanding, well crafted AAA open world zombie game, buy on sale
spoiler free summary:
You are a former soldier turned biker ganger who is caught up in a zombie apocalypse. Ride your motorcycle across the post apocalyptic northwest fighting zombies and raiders, doing jobs for settlements, and searching for your lost wife.
The game is competently made but there is a lot of it that is close to paint-by-numbers for AAA stealth/action titles. You have your stealth takedowns, your distraction rocks, shooting and auto-targeting melee. Your "mount" is available right off the bat and upgrading your motorcycle is a big part of the gameplay. I liked how there was fast travel but you had to work for it either clearing zones so you could travel through them, upgrading your fuel tank so you can travel further, and occasionally stopping to find gas. This made it a bit more immersive up until the end when you have a big enough gas tank to travel across the whole map.
In addition to the stealth/action there are bike "races" where you chase down a target also riding a motorcycle. They are pretty awkward but still something different so a very occasionally nice change of pace. Some gameplay elements are kind of filler like the ability to track a deer once you shot it, but midway through the game ammo stops being an issue and generally you use automatic weapons so if you shoot a deer, it is dead.
The story is closer to resident evil but played straight and not over the top ridiculous. The zombies are virus mutants and the enemies sometimes include children and animals which is a nice touch. At the start you are helping camps with survival type jobs and eventually you go on to do missions for the purpose of fighting back against the zombies.
One draw of this game is the hoard mechanic where you sometimes find packs of hundreds of zombies that try to surround you and are instant death if too many get to you at the same time. In the beginning all you can do is avoid and run but by the end you have enough resources and character progression to fight and win against them.
The weapons and gunplay is pretty generic with the exception of the crossbow but since you can only carry 3 weapons and the crossbow takes up your "heavy" slot it is quickly abandoned when you get your first rifle. IMO this is a missed opportunity and the game should have made the crossbow always available in addition to your other 3 weapon slots. Your melee weapons decay so in the beginning you are constantly switching to new ones but eventually you get a talent that lets you repair them and from that point you just carry the best one. Which is good because later in the game the enemies tend to be stronger and not always having a good melee weapons means you would just never use it anymore.
The voice acting of the main character is particularly good with the writing and delivery nicely portraying constantly stressed and anti-social personality of someone who was in that situation but still able to get by. The other voices are passable with the best friend VA also doing a good job. Some of the random encounter survivor voices are pretty bad and sound like they called in an intern to read the lines that day though.
I found exactly one minor glitch where I did a sidequest "search" out of sequence and the area it told me to search for the final piece didn't have it. I eventually found it outside of that area, I assume where I was intended to start the search. But nothing gamebreaking or requiring a reset to fix.
In general I can't say I loved the game but it was fun enough, though by the end I was just grinding to finish. The hoards make for fun visuals and spectacle and even though they aren't necessarily the main gameplay feature, the rest of the game is necessary to make those experiences stand out.
Possibly spoiler filled detailed wokeness ratings ahead - numbers are on a scale from 0-5 with lower being better and >3 that aspect would make the game unplayable
Feminism 1.5: No main npc girlbosses women. One woman is in charge of the slave camp but she is a frumpy short haired dyke-type whose leadership is explained by her running a prison gang before the zombies. There are women marauders that you shoot/stab/axe. Your wife that you are searching for is a scientist and it turns out her research helped start the apocalypse but nothing really comes out of that. Other female characters are a notable npc mechanic who does occasionally give the main character a moral lecture and the doctor of the main camp is also a woman. There is one anti-feminist scene where you and your wife are on a mission to retrieve a piece of equipment an she goes in alone to an area, has to shoot a bunch of zombies while you find your way in, and when you get there she is locked up in panic pulling the trigger on an empty gun and you have to calm her down.
Faggotry 2: The previously mentioned mechanic and doctor of the main camp are a dyke couple. I think there might be a scene where they held hands, maybe hugged? I dont remember any more physical affection than that. There is a line of dialogue that could be interpreted to imply the main bad guy is butt buddies with his camp doctor but it is never made explicit. Otherwise no homos that I noticed.
Diversity/Negros/Anti-Whiteness: 2.5 Two of the three important NPCs at the final camp are black, one is a "scientist" and the other is a competent commanding officer. The doctor at the previous camp in a lesbian relationship is also black. There is a throwaway pre-apocalypse flashback line about the biker gang leader importing negros to troll "racists". Most of the generic npcs are White. Your best friend appears to be latino coded but it isn't explicitly stated. The doctor in the final camp is latino and he annoyingly inserts spanish into his dialog. Refreshing that this game has a consistently strong and competent White male PC who is unambiguously heroic.
Anti-West/Anti-Christian/Subversion: 3 The leader of the final camp is a religious older White man who talks about God's will so of course he turns out to be a villain. I'm pretty sure they animated some of Hitlers hand gestures and postures for some of his speeches but that could be my imagination. He is implied to be Christian because there is a mission to retrieve his stolen bible. There is a throwaway line about the prison population pre-zombies. Also another throwaway line about "truther bullshit". In the first zone there is an implied right-wing anti-government radio broadcast to which the main character generally reacts negatively.
edit: after thinking about it overnight I wanted to add that outside of the mandatory stealth sections this is the type of game that would benefit from playing it at a higher difficulty to help maintain the tension and immersion. So my advice would be to turn up the difficulty normally, and then turn it down during the stealth missions.
The "Neuro Editor" appears to be focused on writing tasks. So far appears to be "looser" than western AIs on "controversial" topics. I asked it to highlight the irregularities of the 2020 election and it did, but it wouldn't write a persuasive article about the election being illegitimate. It won't provide any race and IQ science other than to say that intelligence testing is controversial. It will write an article about how covid-19 could be man made but won't strongly conclude that it is.
It is another tool for the box and worth checking out if you do a lot of writing tasks.
Here is its results when I asked it for two paragraphs promoting itself:
Yandex Neuro Editor: Your Work Assistant
In today's information-rich world, it is essential to be efficient and not get lost in a flood of tasks. Yandex Neuro Editor, an innovative solution from Yandex, is one of the tools that can help you with this.
What is Yandex Neuro Editor?
Yandex Neuro Editor is a neural network that can create texts based on your requests and ideas. It can generate unique and interesting articles, product descriptions, advertising texts, and more. The neural network can also help you edit and proofread texts, improving their quality and style.
tl;dr not worth watching for itself but is fine background noise for when you are doing something else
Not that the franchise was ever better than "not unwatchable" but this one came out just below that threshold.
A multi century time jump after the last one, peaceful ape tribe is doing peaceful ape stuff when they get bumrushed by warlike ape tribe and conscripted into being their helots. The main hero ape from peaceful tribe has to find a way to free them.
I'm probably not the right audience but chimpanzee politics doesn't exactly get my blood flowing. The CG was impressive but the CG is impressive everywhere nowadays. There was the obligatory human/ape interaction where they had to, yet again, point out how humans are the really uncivilized and the apes are better.
It is 2.5 hours and a slog and I watched it over 4 days, mostly in the background while scrolling twitter or eating lunch.
No obvious wokeness beyond mild anti-humanism which is almost obligatory. I thought the woman human character was exhibiting mary-sueness until it is sort-of explained how she is so knowledgeable.
The best thing it has going for it is CG eagles are cool.
I recommend everyone watch it. Keep a finger on the 30 second skip button to bypass the really degenerate stuff though.
The reason you should watch it is because it is an instructive illustration of what they see when you disagree with them. And of how much they hate YOU. Not some abstract concept, but you personally. Sam Hyde wasn't even slightly exaggerating when he said “When we win, do not forget that these people want you broke, dead, your kids raped and brainwashed, and they think it's funny.” If anything, he wasn't expressing the sentiment strongly enough.
Remember those lessons for when the other side asks of you any mercy or human consideration, and for when the people supposedly on our side call for restraint.
I knew it wouldn't be great but was at least hoping for a memeable villain like homelander. And while it was ok the first couple of eps they progressively made the White male Christian bad guy more and more retarded and clownish.
The first 3 seasons were great, didn't watch 4 because I read it was race focused, this one is somehow more feminist wish fulfillment than Y the Last Man.
edit: Ive been reading so much 40k that I got the title mixed up. This is regarding Marvel Midnight Suns by Firaxis.
Haven't played very much past the tutorial and im hoping it gets better but so far the gameplay feels like it was designed for mobile. There is a deck mechanic where your actions are based on the cards you draw with normal cards giving you resources that are used to play more effective "heroic" cards. The positioning options are fairly limited so it feels less like xcom and more like slay the spire with a bit of movement. Maybe it gets more complicated later but so far it looks like it will just be a grinder.
Visually it is very generic Unreal engine which isnt a strike against it but it isn't something its favor either.
There is the obligatory wokeness in the character creator with "body type" and the female faces are all manly.
The dialogue is obviously an attempt to ape the marvel "wit" but written by the C team of diversity hires so it leads to more sighs than chuckles.
Like I said I'm only about an hour in but so far haven't seen anything that makes me particularly hopeful. If it keeps going this way I doubt I'll be making it past the 2nd hour.
I was looking over my farside calendar and thinking "Why doesn't something like this exist for historical events that our side wants to highlight?"
Examples in no particular order
- June 9, 1967: USS Liberty attacked by the state of Israel
- August 25, 1967: George Lincoln Rockwell was assassinated
- April 19, 1993: Feds burn down Branch Davidian compound killing over 100 including 25 children
- August 22, 1992: Vicki Weaver was killed by FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi
- November 21, 1985: Jonathan Pollard was caught giving classified Navy document to Israel.
- June 4, 2004: Killdozer day
- September 19, 1995: New York Times and Washington Post publish Unabomber Manifesto - Industrial Society and Its Future
And so on.
The product would be a publicly accessible database with API, secured as best as we can because we know how gay commies are, so if anyone else wanted to use these they could. The content would be 1 para, 5 para, and longform summaries of the events along with public-domain images. It could be mostly the wikipedia articles re-written to remove gay-commie bias. The initial client frontend application could be a simple website that lists 1 page summary and a couple of public domain images based on the current day.
Ideally the website and project wouldn't have any of our fingerprints on it so it could potentially be passed off as "normie friendly".
- does something like this exist
- what do you guys think?