What I meant by that is the ability to access the entire world interconnectivity - obviously cutting those cables would not affect domestic internet access but people who live elsewhere would not be able to access content hosted overseas in gulf states.
I don’t think Iran cares if their citizens can access the internet or not. I presume their military uses satellites for that sort of thing so they won’t be negatively affected by it.
The rest of the world, on the other hand, gets their access to worldwide connectivity held hostage.
The Oregon Trail generation!
Missed out on that one by a couple years unfortunately, though I feel more of a connection to those who had a pre-digital childhood like myself than I do to the iPad babies of today.
Warhammer 40k Mechanicus
I think it’s concept art, or maybe some promotional art. If you Google image search for it, it’ll come up on the first page.
Good read, but I think the author touched on something that is way more troubling. Sure, you can get reliable information from regular people who are living in other parts of the world, but spreading that information with any kind of veracity is almost impossible due to the collapse in public trust of mainstream media.
If I say something with any degree of authority or confidence, someone in the comments will inevitably chant the ancestral magic spell “Source?!” and suddenly my evidence of a conversation with a stranger on the internet is reduced to merely anecdotal at best. Able to be dismissed outright without thought or care.
However, if I post a link to some legacy media rag, existing in the modern day as a mere husk being puppeteered by corporate oligarchs, wearing the skin of a legitimate and trustworthy news source, the credibility of the information is then called into question by anybody reasonable - knowing full well that right-wing governments have managed to capture most of the remaining independent reporting, or at least have threatened them with who-knows-what in an attempt to influence their press releases that would otherwise paint the government or any of their cronies in a negative light. If someone decides that the provided source doesn’t line up with their narrative, it’s hilariously easy to attack the reporting itself as being “fake news”.
The brain shuts off, and information gets siloed. Objective reality is no longer shared. We are still living in a state of simply believing whatever we want to believe and the few people who are able to break out of that are not going to be influential enough to have an effect on anything. We can pat ourselves on the back for not being a group of people concerned with being brand-builders, I guess, but in the end it’s a meaningless victory.
Not buying a Switch 2 for a game I already played 29 years ago.
I fucking love Star Fox but it hurts to see the franchise rotting on the vine. I know Nintendo’s philosophy is that they only want to make a sequel if they can advance some new mechanics or hardware tech, and clearly they saw the mouse mode and 2-player co-op as the impetus to even make this in the first place, but god damn would I love to see a new story with the exact same gameplay.
Sometimes you just come up on a formula that works and you can let the writers take the wheel for a bit. Not every game needs to push the envelope in terms of graphics or mechanical complexity or never-before-seen gameplay loops.
Not really, although I can see how what I wrote might come off as that.
Learning how to interact socially with other people isn’t masking. It’s a practiced skill just like anything else. For some people, it comes quite naturally. For others, like myself, it was challenging. I’m happier now because I fit in better with others socially.
I do not believe in the idea that aspects of one’s personality are immutable and unchangeable. I think that most people would look back on themselves as a young adult and see an entirely different person that who they are now. The same is true for me.
I had someone tell it to me straight - that the reason I was getting side-eyes and laughter behind my back and why girls wanted nothing to do with me was because I was an awkward dweeb.
At first it kind of hurt my feelings, but it kind of woke me up to the reality of the situation and I began to not only notice how other people saw me, but I started examining myself and my own actions in a more critical light.
Most of the time it was me behaving inappropriately in the given situation. Everyone else walking to their next class? There’s me Naruto running down the hall. You get the idea.
I had to learn to identify the behaviors that people were critical of or found off-putting, and learn the appropriate behavior to emulate. Eventually, after I learned the correct response to any particular social situation, it was less about knowledge and more about confidence. I was lucky to make some well-adjusted and confident friends in high school who helped me learn what it was all about. I didn’t fret about talking to random people anymore, I could carry on a normal conversation for at least five minutes, I developed “normal” hobbies and interests (but crucially I kept my old ones as well, they were just not the first things I would lead with when talking to people), and in general I just mellowed out a little and developed the skill to be able to read a room and know how to deal with certain people.
tl;dr - someone talked to me and told me I was an awkward kid, but they also did their best to help me identify and fix the things that made me weird and unlikable.
I learned a while ago that the opposite of ambidextrous is ambisinister. The “left” origin of the word sinister gives a bit more context, as if describing someone who had two left hands!