CIWS-30

You’ll start to oxidize?

It’s true. If anything, people are more tolerant of women being this way. Where a man would get a fist in the face, a woman will get polite or even good treatment, especially if she’s pretty.

Ironically, for old stuff at least, Piracy is the only way it’s reliably preserved. Even if you do want to buy it new to support the creators, oft-times you can’t. It’s because I can’t buy it that I turn to piracy. Not just for old games, but sometimes old comics and manga too. Occasionally Anime that’s no longer licensed or available.

Plus, it’s only going to get worse now, with Streaming services and online platforms delisting anything even that might not make a profit because they don’t want to pay residuals. I’m not big on pirating new releases, but that’s because I think we should support artists. I also think we should call for the creators to be paid more of the profit share vs. the money people at the top who seem to do nothing but fire people and shoot down good ideas to try to make everything the same carbon copy live service.

I also don’t have to pirate new stuff, because it’ll old stuff on sale at half price (or less) soon enough, and with all the bugs fixed and the features added the way it should have been at launch. My backlog is so huge that I won’t have time to go through it anyway before I die. So there’s another reason I don’t care much about new games. If I’m still interested in them a year or more later when they’re on sale and fixed up, I’ll buy it then.

As for stuff like Anime and Manga. Anime subscriptions are surprisingly cheap, and so are monthly manga subs if you know where to look. Viz’s Shounen Jump ($3) Vizmanga ($2), Azuki.co ($5), Mangamo (also $5 last I checked)… so long as you only subscribe to one at a time and rotate, you’ll probably never run out, and it’s a lot cheaper than buying it one volume at a time $10 each or whatever.

As someone who is good at memorization (although not as much post COVID) but has been historically poor at critical thinking, I agree. People kept telling me I was “smart” and that there was no way I could fail X or should fail X, but life experience and slow but steady analysis showed me that no, everyone (including my parents and teachers) were wrong. I was dumb as bricks, I’m just good at memorizing things.

I’m aware that my critical thinking skills aren’t great. I’m also aware that I had no business going to college (and failing of course) studying what I did (computer science) and that it’s actually very good and liberating to admit how fallible you are, and how bad you are at things, because it gives you the freedom and insight to know what you can do instead of what you can’t.

I’ve lived long enough to see stupid people succeed at what “smart” people fail at, just because they’re honest enough and humble enough to admit when they can’t do something, and also when they’re wrong. I saw that doing something right imperfectly (but effectively) is more useful than doing something wrong with perfect execution. It’s the difference between going forward at a walk, and going backwards with a rocket thruster.

I’m disappointed, but not surprised. This is how they are, especially during times of stress, like war. Culture could probably get better if not for their leadership, but I doubt we’ll see it improve until Putin and the people backing him get purged.

Honestly, I’m shocked by this. I would have thought that they’d at least be not-stupid enough to have something like that.