I'll take metric for 'everyday' use seriously when they start calling 2,000 kilometers "2 megameters".
Until then they're just poseurs.
Metric is better for tool measurements. Hands down.
If the metric "9" socket is too big, what size do you grab next?
If the imperial "1/2" socket is too big, what size do you grab next? A 7/16? A 15/32? A 31/64? Who fucking knows, typically the answer is 'whatever is next to the open hole in my toolbox cutouts, assuming I have them'.
One is much easier to answer than the other, which requires nothing more than rote memorization of 'standard' fractional notation and mental division.
Metric becoming standard on vehicles came with an additional advantage, they basically decided to make the 10mm the socket that will work on 95% of the bolts in the entire car. Nice round number.
The one conspiracy I think I do believe is I think a lot of these types of conspiracies were seeded by the government because of who they target and how they responded to them.
If you're a government and you have a large demographic of perpetual malcontents who are heavily armed and constantly talking about revolution and civil war, but you can't just round them up and gas them, what do you do?
Drive them insane.
MKULTRA was real but every conspiracy theorist thinks they're somehow immune to it. They think all the narrative control weapons are all targeting liberals, and they're "too smart" to fall for the ones that target the right.
So these people are not just something of a powder keg liability, but they're also very gullible, very dumb, and very paranoid.
Fill their heads with insane bullshit. Make them waste years upon years of their lives obsessing over worthless events nobody cares about that will never have a payoff. Bonus points: use narratives that make them believe the government is literally an angry omnipotent God, with the power and will to do anything they want, including controlling hurricanes and earthquakes.
Literally shit that was Biblical in nature they now attribute to government. Government is God to them.
And how do you fight God?
You don't. You can't. Why even bother? Don't go outside or they'll drone strike you. Don't make friends and organize because they are all feds. Just sit at home complaining on the internet, accomplishing nothing, while your age and BMI gradually climb. Don't vote or run for office because elections are fake. Don't try to join the system to change it from the inside because all your friends will hate you and call you a fed traitor.
The most tragic is this: right wingers are mad about Ruby Ridge. Timothy McVeigh blew up a huge VBIED to protest Ruby Ridge. Right wingers immediately and forever call him a fed. Lmao.
Even if he was a fed, isn't it better to take credit for it even just as a symbolic gesture of your frustration and what you could be capable of?
They even released the video of him in the lobby and elevator pushing a luggage cart with like twenty giant bags on it.
And he was paying for an expensive room, they aren't going to question it.
And it's Vegas, a city with tons of industrial conventions all the time, it's entirely within reason for a guy to have tons of bags if it contains product for a trade show.
Am I saying something about him didn't stink? No, if his whole plan was a shooting, to a rational person, his setup made no sense. Too many rifles all with odd configurations (no irons or optics on many, like they come from the factory). But again we're talking "to a rational mind".
But I've always been skeptical of nearly all conspiracy theories, and it really is as simple as this: Treat every conspiracy theory with the same level of detail and skepticism as the theorists treat the official story.
Remember Harrison Deal, the guy in Georgia? If the official story was that his car was blown up by a bomb, everyone would be talking about how the damage on the car doesn't look like a bomb, there was no debris field, there was strange damage that "folded" the Jeep, and the bodywork was still attached. People would compare it to pictures of real vehicle bombings showing pieces of bodywork sprayed all over the place.
In other words "nothing about this looks like a bomb". But because the official story was a car crash, suddenly it became a bomb even though the damage makes no sense for it to be a bomb (along with other things like inventing the lie that "the engine was 300 yards away", but you can see the front end of the vehicle was basically intact).
Conspiracy: "GARY WEBB WAS KILLED BECAUSE HE BROKE IRAN-CONTRA!"
Reality: Congress is who broke Iran Contra. Webb wrote a book years later. And he died years after the book. Also you can still buy the book... Who the fuck covers up a story that's already public?
Conspiracy: "MICHAEL HASTINGS WAS KILLED BECAUSE HE WAS GOING TO TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT THE IRAQ WAR!"
Reality: Hastings was a shitlib who sandbagged a very popular General who was critical of Obama and the Iraq war and got him fired. Both Congress and the British Parliament broke the story of the Iraq Dossier. And just like Webb, he wrote the books after the story was already public, he died long after they were written, and you can still buy them.
Also in the cases of both, not a single person who knew them really doubted the official narrative. Webb was in a downward spiral for years and his life was falling apart. Everyone who knew Hastings suggested he had a substance abuse problem.
The dumbest is "Chris Cornell was going to write a story exposing Hollywood pedophiles". Lmao literally never, not once, did he ever even suggest that that was anything he was doing.
I mean we already are there. Half the gay shit the people on this entire website believe is fake. And it doesn't even need AI, people believe what supports their opinions.
Do you know how many times I've heard conspiracy faggotry about the Vegas shooting that uses an argument like "OMG are we supposed to believe he removed hurricane grade windows by himself"?
Hurricane grade glass isn't a rating. In order to determine how strong the glass was youd need to actually source the glass contractor and what was purchased and get the technical specifications for it.
Do you think even one fucking person, anywhere, ever, has even attempted to find out what sort of glass was on the Mandaly Bay? Lol fuck no. These people just invent gay fucking shit and they think "hurricane grade" sounds right, and it fools similar idiots who also 'want to believe', and just like that it becomes "fact".
AI hardly changes fuck all in that regard.
AI art, to include writing, is as good as the effort put in to refine it.
If you tell AI to write a novel it's going to be incredibly mediocre.
But if you comb through what it generated and inject hundreds of prompts it actually can and will generate something extremely good.
I honestly would be down to see some actual artistic experimentation with that, like having a novel half written by AI and half by human hand, then the author at the end reveals it's all AI or the parts were reversed.
That's the absolute best part of this and I'm glad people noticed.
Granted it sucked but Photoshop has had "content aware fill", the precursor to what we do now with a button-press, since CS5, released 15 fucking years ago.
Any and every sort of digital art has always used tools to automate and simplify processes for as long as it's existed. That was literally the entire reason they quit hand drawing every fucking frame.
All of those tools opened up art creation potential to more and more people who didn't have the talent to hand draw.
All AI art does is expand that toolbox to the point that everyday laymen can generate something.
I'm sure there were purists scoffing at digital artist as "not real artists" and now it's the digital artists trying to gatekeep.
With one exception. 28 days later. The plot of the first was that they just quarantined England to let the zombies all starve to death.
While this might seem too far for you, the idea that they have no logistical capability to mass produce and distribute the vaxx is just basic logic about the world and their shoddy setup.
This is why bad writers poorly writing a game world that has no internal logic don't write good games.
What you're saying is logical and sensible, but you're making that argument in a game where there was no logic, there was no sense, and as you pointed out, it's clear that the writers didn't know what they were talking about half the time.
Yes, formulating a vaccine would require a massive lab, chemical vats, precision instrumentation, and probably many hard-to-acquire reagents.
But formulating a functional society requires fresh water, large-scale farming, sanitation, and cooperation.
The game decided to literally wave it's hand and determine that absolutely fuck-all about any of that was actually needed, so why do they need a vaccine lab? The writer just had to write one line claiming they could do it and who can say otherwise? 'Well we never see the lab', well we never see what the fuck this retarded cannibal village is eating to sustain a thousand people, up in the mountains, in winter, with nearly no vehicles. They just somehow survive because the game needed them to.
We ask the same questions as to how the nuclear-blasted ruins of Washington DC in Fallout 3 can somehow sustain an entire village living in a rusted aircraft carrier surrounded by a million billion Supermutants that look like they require 12,000 calories a day of pure protein to sustain their killer gains. There's zero farming, zero logistics, nothing at all. Everyone just survives because that's what they need the game to do. Christ the entire fucking game plot revolves around the fact that all the water is pure poison, what the fuck is everybody actually drinking then?
You don't ask because the writer didn't know either.
I never had any real opinion on the Fireflies because literally everybody in that game was a total fucking cartoon. The writing was not good, and it is an insanely overrated game. Of course the Fireflies are a cartoon too, because the game had absolutely zero subtlety to it.
Half the theory crafting on the Internet is Redditors spazzing out because "they'll become dictators and control people with the vaccine", ignoring the part where 99% of human history was made under the direction of "dictators".
And literally if anything could be assumed about "control" of the world in TLOU it would be that most of the survivors have to go because clearly nearly everybody you meet is for some reason a deranged retarded psychopath because everybody has this dumbass nihilistic idea that "post apocalypse" means everybody becomes a Mad Max savage.
Meanwhile humanity faced multiple plagues that killed huge percentages of the population and disrupted society and exactly zero times did everybody turn into frothing cannibals.
So yeah the writing pushed the idea that they were incompetent and couldn't make a cure because it's the same extremism every writer feels they need to make it obvious who the "good guys" are.
It's like the Neo Nazi gun store owner who randomly shows up in Falling Down in one of the dumbest scenes in movie history.
Never forget that they actually gave Crash an oscar.
"They" also say The Boys is good when it's just degenerate communist revenge-fantasy wankfuel.
To me the biggest problem the game (at least the first, didn't play the second) had was the total dissonance between the game part, and the story part.
Like okay, it's the apocalypse, and there's some fungus that killed 99% of humanity.
Every time you're in a "fighting humans" stage you're fighting like 300 guys who have absolutely zero regard for their own lives. Dudes run at you with baseball bats while you point a shotgun at them.
There's a "cannibal village" in the Colorado mountains, not only do you get captured by them dozens of miles away while they have a 'search party' (presumably looking for people to eat), but you kill like 100 of them right before that point. Then you kill like 100 more. Then when you escape there's THOUSANDS of them running out of the trees like it's a scene from 28 Days Later.
Where did they 'get' an uninfected town of thousands of people? Who do they recruit to be fellow cannibals and who do they eat? How is this a sustainable society at all if they were so desperate they spent all that energy and fuel to go out of the mountains to grab two people to presumably feed the entire village?
At some point you're at a dam, and sure enough, here come the suicidal hordes, who blow up everything just because they're bad guys, and you mow down dozens of them. Here you are in a city and there's more suicidal hordes of men just standing around waiting to die. Here you are in a town. Here you are in a hotel. Here you are in a forest. By the end of it you've probably killed like 3% of the global surviving population.
And on top of all of this, you're restricted with asinine game mechanics like "you can only carry 6 rifle rounds". You have the very-common-but-always immersion-breaking moments of enemies having infinite ammo and you kill them and only get one bullet. And this fungus that's supposed to be 100% lethal? You fight zombies that attack you with spore bombs. You walk or fall into spore clouds. Like you're totally immune to it. You can't have your game be based around this idea that this is dangerous and deadly and also have multiple gameplay moments where you just shake it off.
you shouldn't have called names
I didn't want to stay on topic, not with you, which is why I disrespected you with my first post and always will in the future.
Literally the first two responses in this thread:
- Someone worthlessly going off about Star Citizen to call me stupid based in nonsense because he didn't even know the game was a Kickstarter.
That means he's fucking stupid. If you didn't know the refund window of Star Citizen would mean I bailed early on, then you have zero right to have opinions and voice them. Stupid people don't deserve respect. Be correct, or say nothing.
- A guy comparing 'switching guns' to 'your character randomly gets PTSD' in a trolling fashion, because he was angry I bad-mouthed Bungie (who likely popularized this feature with Halo).
That means he's a fanboy defending dogshit games in bad faith, and he doesn't deserve respect either.
But now you faggots are just trolling so go fuck yourselves.
Notice you stopped talking about grenade mechanics immediately and switched to "okay sweetie" like a Redditor.
Right-wingers admitting they were wrong about anything on the internet, challenge level: impossible.
Rather than lashing out about being given a bit of shit about it
Eat shit cockbrain, you literally jumped out of the gate to call me fucking stupid in your second sentence, and now you're pretending you're a victim?
You clearly had zero knowledge of the timeframe of Star Citizen development, and your shitty little remark was rooted more in internet commentator populism, "haha Star Citizen let me use this chance to jump in with commentary nobody asked for so I can feel superior".
it would be better for you to figure out how you missed all of the red flags and gave them any money in the first place.
lmao you're literally still doing it.
Go show me your comment history from anywhere on the internet from back in 2012 of you warning everyone it was a scam. Show us all the 'red flags' that existed.
Come on, let's see it.
Were you even fucking alive back then?
Thing is, quick-throw grenades didn't exist in Battlefield until BF3. It clearly was a "modern audiences" feature. Prior to that you had to pull out the grenade. Grenades were more lethal, but had far, far more risk in their use. Result was much less grenade spam. If someone ran behind cover, it wasn't just casting explosive fireball spells at them, if you pulled out your grenade to flush them out you didn't know if they were about to pop around the corner and shoot you. Often times you'd rely on a buddy in your squad to cover or throw the grenade.
Only if you remember that that was mostly caused by people making it "all proxies" as a laugh. Either way they weren't quick-throw and this has literally nothing to do with cookie-cutter copy-pasted 'features' developers just slap in like it's a formulaic feature, without any consideration for how it affects things.
Yeah wow I'm such a sucker for getting 100% of my money back, I guess.
That is what it took for you to finally see sanity?
"See sanity"? This was ten years ago, only about three years or so after the Kickstarter ended, when they failed to produce results. What I'm talking about didn't happen last fucking week.
Since you're clearly kind of stupid, Star Citizen went like this:
Kickstarter 2012 (no game) -> Development 2012-2013 (no game) -> Hangar module 2013 (barely a game, but 'hey something exists') -> Arena Module 2014 (okay our ships can shoot guns) -> Persistent Universe 2015 (um, that's cool, but something feels wrong) -> FPS module / end of refund period 2016.
I will never understand people who bought into that "game".
It was called a Kickstarter. We backed a game concept. Sorry, what were we supposed to guess/know about it back in 2012 before development had even started? We didn't buy into a "game" because the game literally didn't exist. Do you, like, have no understanding of how Kickstarters worked?
Sorry were you just really looking to feel good about yourself or something with that smug remark?
You actually think that's even remotely comparable? Are you genuinely fucking stupid? It's comparable to reloading a magazine, you stupid asshole.
"Reloading" is a mechanic that takes a player out of the fight for a time, leaving them highly vulnerable while they prepare their weapon again.
Having to pull out and use a grenade is a mechanic that takes a player out of the fight for a time, leaving them highly vulnerable while they prepare their weapon again.
And you think this is comparable to 'random jamming'?
I literally cannot understate how much I fucking hate you for this stupid fucking comment you made. Delete your account you cunt.
Metric is interesting in that it was built upon scientific relationships but those relationships are meaningless for 99% of people and are, in and of themselves, arbitrary. If we ever came across aliens their measurements would be completely different because metric is ultimately based off of the circumference of the Earth (that's the basis of the meter).
Of course those snobs have tried to "standardize" it in idiotic ways, like defining the meter as "one three hundred millionth something of the time it takes light to travel one second" but that's retarded. They had to do it because the meter has always been a fucked-up measurement.
It's a big fat "who cares".