CerebralHawks

It sucks that it took Trump’s shenanigans to do this, but Canada is a big place and should be reasonably self-sufficient. Someone else already said tech is going to be hard to source. I thought I heard that Canada was dealing with China for some tech, so you could build a computer and put Linux on it. While the Linux distro might be built by an American or a European, it’s not sold for profit, so you’d just be using it. If there’s a Canadian distro, I don’t know. Sorry, I’m a Mac user and quite happy with my Macs. But if I were forced to use an Intel/AMD machine, I would 100% be a Linux user. I don’t care for Microsoft at all (except for gaming, they’re the slightly lesser evil between them and Sony).

I just checked. Both Apple Maps and Google Maps still call it Lake Ontario, even if I VPN into the US.

Someone said the other day that Google Maps has already renamed it, but if they aren’t doing it in the app to a user with an American (USian, whatever) IP address, who fucking cares? I can’t replicate it on their website, though, so I’m not sure what that person was on about.

Apple Maps was the first to rename the Gulf of Mexico for Tim Cook’s political buddy; they did it almost immediately, but Google followed suit by the end of the day. Now it seems the tech companies are holding off.

Now MapQuest is getting a lot of love for not changing it, but the big two map apps haven’t done it yet, either.

The originals were okay. Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare II were legendary FPS games with their own fictional story, but not really a whole lotta bullshit outside of that. Was it propaganda for/against certain countries? Sure. But if you can think for yourself (i.e. you’re not swayed by a fictional story), they were pretty good games. Even Black Ops was a lot of fun.

I had GamePass for a little while and decided to try the newest Call of Duty. I forget which one. The installation was confusing AF even on Xbox. Then when I went in, I could not find the actual game beyond the multiplayer and the ads. I actually had to search the Internet for how to start the game. I’d ask “how is this not obvious?” but the ads and the monetisation had become the whole point of the game. The game was not free, but it was effectively competing with Fortnite, so it was up to the same bullshit. At least with Fortnite, I have no problem getting into the standard Battle Royale match. (I know everybody loves to hate on Fortnite, but I’m an old school Unreal Tournament player, and Fortnite moves the same, due to it being the same engine… so, naturally, I am very good at it, and it’s fun to school the new generation from time to time.)

When I finally got into the game, I thought it was okay at first. We did a prison break and that was fun. Like what I remember from back in the day, it was like an interactive movie. Then I switched to a female character (awesome! representation!), but after a while, I couldn’t figure out where to go. The instructions were unclear, it wasn’t obvious, and the Internet was no help. It was like nobody really cares about the single player experience, it’s all about online now.

With the old ones, it was always very clear what they wanted you to do, and if you had the patience (think All Ghillied Up from Modern Warfare, where you have to crawl on your hands and knees between the marching soldiers and tanks, super slow, to not get caught), you were gonna get through it. Might take a try or two, but you can take all the tries you need. There was no “just run around this big open map until you figure it out”. The gameplay was tighter back then, and, honestly, for a guy who started with Pong/2600, Xbox 360 era games still look good to me. I don’t mind XB1/Series graphics (I’m sitting on my The Witcher 3 playthrough until the remaster comes out, since it’s a free update), but 360 was perfectly fine. It’s not “warts and all” to me; I genuinely think 360/PS3 era games looked great. And, with the RAMmageddon going on, remember that the Xbox 360 had no system RAM whatsoever — the system shared the 512MB of graphics memory from the GPU. (It was also a tri-core IBM PowerPC, so, basically a Mac from back then.) And the PS3 was a bit weaker in some regards and more powerful in others (IIRC it had a bunch of speciality chips that were hard to code for, but once mastered, made it the superior console to an experienced developer). Anyway, my Mac from 2022-2023 can basically play all PS3 games nearly flawlessly, and so can, I imagine, most decent (not even gaming) PCs, so… maybe we should take a closer look at that generation for our gaming.

I mean, the best laptops don’t come with Windows, but you already mentioned the MacBook as an exception.

With desktops, I kinda get it if you’re a gamer, but for a laptop… why??

She was too old for him

They have the wallpaper locked at work somehow. Thanks for the reminder I need to stylise my cursor again. Black with green border.

At home, I’ve been Windows free for a few years now.

Sounds like the US organisations used the same competency for their IT that they use for their leaders.

Also if it really happened they would have released the unredacted Epstein files.

I just thought the voice didn’t match the character.

I watched the extended look trailer thing, and I didn’t see anything impressive. It’s a GTA game, but it seems bland and uninspired. There’s nothing here that Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t do better six years ago. Hard to believe this is how they justify the $100 price tag.

I just bought the remastered version of Saints Row: The Third on Xbox (I previously owned the Xbox 360 version) for $4.49, less than 5% of the cost of GTA VI. I’ve played through it a couple times before, but it’s been a while, and I’m looking forward to getting back into it.

I never beat GTA V. I own it, I got pretty far in it, but never beat it. I think I just lost interest? It’s not a bad game by any means, it just wasn’t that fun.

Looking back, I really only enjoyed the first two GTA games (on PC, the top-down ones), and San Andreas.

There are shoes where an AirTag (or similar device) can be concealed in the heel so children can be tracked. Apparently it’s well embedded and the child doesn’t feel it when they walk, and it’s difficult to detect/remove.

I agree the bottom surgery should be an option, but not every trans person wants bottom surgery.

And what do you mean by “you give”? Should the taxpayers pay for it? I do not think bottom surgery is cheap.

Some people turn to crime to get three hots and a cot. It’s offensive to say, but people have done it. Jail/prison sucks, but homelessness sucks worse and some people have made that choice. If jail/prison is also a way to get free (taxpayer funded) bottom surgery, I can see people going that route.

Of course, if you want to make an argument for socialised medicine, I will agree, so we can skip that whole runaround. The general problem with socialised medicine is higher taxes, and I think you get longer wait times since more people are going in for care, but ultimately I believe it makes a people more healthy.

Okay, a lot of people feel that way. So, how many convicted murderers are you willing to take in? What about people who have assaulted children? Are you willing to trust them around your children because you feel society has failed them?

A lot of people want all the inmates let out, but not in their backyard. They typically want them released in the backyards of people they don’t like. In other words, they want to weaponise them.

So then you have the issue of “what do we do with people we deem a threat to society”?

He doesn’t. But he knows other people do, and just because he has a one-track mind, he assumes people being mad about “losing” Lake Ontario will forget about his involvement in the Trump-Epstein files for a news cycle.

Neither Google nor Apple has bent the knee just yet. (With the “Gulf of America”, I’m pretty sure Apple bent the knee first.)

The answer is, he is an individual, and Flock cameras are not targeting any one individual, at least not in theory.

Also, I see the argument he’s making. The argument is, if it were your child who was kidnapped, would you not want your neighbors to give up some of their privacy in order to turn cameras on every corner toward getting your child home safely? But the problem with that is, Flock cameras are not bringing kidnapped kids home. Neither are Ring doorbells, which are just as bad. What they are doing is making life worse for people of colour and anyone else They want to target. So that’s the problem. The parent can’t blame their neighbours (particularly their dark-skinned neighbours) for wanting their privacy when a child’s safety is on the line, because the Flock cameras are not bringing any children home. That’s not what they’re for, and pretending they are is bullshit and everybody on both sides knows it. We COULD use all this tech for good. But the people who run it don’t want to. They’ve proven this time and again. So no, they do not get the benefit of the doubt. No, they do not get to take the high road, even hypothetically.

I’m all for trans rights, but I’m not sure what people want prisons to actually do here.

So the issue is, trans women want to be housed in women’s facilities. But the state says they are biologically male, so they are housed in men’s facilities. Trans advocates are saying they are subject to sexual assault in men’s prisons more so than male inmates because they present as female.

The problem with citing the Eighth Amendment (freedom from cruel and unusual punishment) is that it does not exclusively apply to transgender inmates — and I don’t think anyone is suggesting it does. The issue is the women in women’s prisons, if you introduce a person who is (in the eyes of the law) biologically male, you’re violating the Eighth Amendment of the women at the women’s prison. At that point, if a person can just choose which prison they go to, why not just integrate them? This would cost more and have higher taxes, and nobody wants to pay that.

I did a bit of Googling, and I’m no expert, but it seems like some states will house a trans woman in a women’s prison if she’s had bottom surgery (that is, she has a vagina), and in some cases, has changed her official identification (which requires the bottom surgery). The issue here is, not every trans person wants bottom surgery. There are plenty of trans women who have penises, and they want to be housed at a women’s prison — honestly, not unlike cis male inmates at a male facility, they would love to be the only penis-having inmate at the women’s prison.

And therein lies the problem. It seems like the states are saying “you have a penis, you go to a men’s prison, you have a vagina, you go to the women’s prison.” It’s not about trans people because (at least in some cases) it isn’t affecting trans people who have completed bottom surgery.

I don’t know what we can or should do about it. I do know the US has taken steps to prevent prison rape. If a person assigned male at birth is taking steps to present as female, but has not (or does not want to) completed bottom surgery, it seems like prison is not a good place for them.

So maybe we should stop saying “be gay, do crime”. Because that sounds like the worst thing a gay (or any LGBTQ+ person) could do.

Final thought: not everyone with a penis will rape someone with a vagina and/or presenting as a female given the opportunity. If that were the case, you wouldn’t be able to have daughters if you have sons and vice-versa. Some states do require separate bedrooms/changing areas past a certain age, but requiring them to be housed separately would not work in our society. Growing up Gen X, I personally did not have sisters, but I knew guys who did, and they would be alone with their sisters (sometimes also with 1-3 brothers as well, with the girl the only girl there) and I never heard about any sexual assaulting. Granted those are siblings, but still. Most people don’t want to rape anybody, even if they have the means and opportunity.

In Cyberpunk, they used Cherami Leigh for V, who was probably best known for voicing Asuna Yuuki (female lead) in Sword Art Online. I think that series is “why” she’s V in the same way The Matrix is “why” Keanu Reeves was Johnny (a role written for David Bowie). But, other than The Dark Tower, I can’t really fit Idris Elba into that analogy, and that movie sucked (I liked it, but as a reader of the books… it was shit). The Matrix needs no introduction, but Sword Art Online also dealt with themes of being trapped in another world, much like Johnny was in the “soul prison”. Especially in the third and fourth seasons, where they got into time dilation (perhaps more popularly explored in Black Mirror and Interstellar). A roundabout way of saying, her resume made her appropriate for the cast.

The guy — I forget his name — sounds like he’s from New York. He’s actually a good voice actor, I don’t have a single problem with his performance, or at least I wouldn’t if Night City was New York City… instead of (near) Los Angeles. I think Cherami Leigh is from, or lives in, California, but her V voice is nothing like her Asuna voice. You can kinda hear it sometimes (like that awesome Corpo V line when checking into Konpeki Plaza (“did I ask you to think?” … “next time, just do as you’re told”)) but mostly, she’s speaking more lowly, more sultry. For a person whose personal motto is “love and light,” it doesn’t seem like a good role for her… but she killed it. (She also narrates the audiobook of the novel, which isn’t about the Johnny story, but rather is just set in the same world. No something. Escape? Excuse? Something like that. It’s a good story. At least as good as the Edgerunners anime.

As for Witcher 3… Wandering in the Dark? Tried to find the quest you meant. I’ve done that one. I didn’t mean the witch you can hook up with, I meant the witch in the swamp. But, I’ve done both. I recall it being annoying and I hear you on “where a lot of playthroughs go to die,” but it’s not why I took a break.

My strategy in The Witcher 3 is to always do the lowest-leveled quest, so I never end up too strong for any of them. However, through the course of Velen, I’ve gone from “the lowest leveled quest is 1-2 levels above Geralt, guess I’ll do my best” to “the lowest leveled quest is 1-2 levels below Geralt, might as well just get it out of the way.”

I also, as a guy, play girls in games, but mostly because it makes sense. Fallout 3 got me on that, where there was a perk (Black Widow or Lady Killer depending on your gender) that would grant you a buy/sell bonus against merchants of the opposite sex, and a damage buff against them as well. So I’d play a girl because most of the villains were male. The best early vendor is a woman, but she also gives a ton of quests, so I’m never really hurting for money by selling her stuff I find along the way. As soon as I got to Rivet City (the aircraft carrier in the south), I’d start focusing on the male vendors, at least until I had a decent amount of money. In games like Mass Effect and Cyberpunk 2077, it just seems like a poor choice to play the guy. Like, they hired a male voice actor to record the lines for guys who couldn’t stomach playing a woman, guys who could never play Tomb Raider for example, but I feel like they went out of their way to get a really good voice actor for the female version. Saints Row is actually an outlier here since the guy can be voiced by Troy Baker, but Laura Bailey’s almost equally good, so it’s not like the female Boss is a bad choice or even a lesser one.

So Velen is the second area? That’s where I am. It feels like mostly side quests strung together. I started with the butcher/baron dude, did his quests, and now I’m following Ciri’s trail. Also dealt with a witch and a village of kids.

I’m with you on the story games. I need to try RDR2 again. I did the intro and not much else, back when it was new. Borrowed it, and had to return it. I also like Mass Effect (all of them, including 4/Andromeda), and Cyberpunk 2077. I’ll also add Fallout 3 and New Vegas, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and the first three Deus Ex games. I generally prefer the ones where you make it your story (Bethesda games and Cyberpunk). The difference with The Witcher and, I suspect, Red Dead, is, it’s not YOUR story, it’s HIS. In The Witcher 3, you play Geralt, and you can act out of character, but it’s still his story, and you know you’re acting out of character. For example, I set a monster free because I think the alternative was some kids would die? I’m pretty sure Geralt himself would have gone the other way, but the choice was mine and I chose the kids. I like how the game doesn’t give you easy choices. They’re both wrong to a degree, it’s just you pick the one you can live with. So I definitely like that.

White Orchard was fine. I dreaded the boss fight because my brother-in-law had a hard time with it. (I later learned he was playing on the highest difficulty.) So I did everything else I could. I may have missed things — everyone knows the Witcher games are full of details people tend to miss. Only thing I didn’t do that I know I could was kill cows to summon the secret boss. Not messing with that.

I’m in the next area. It let me choose the area. I chose the one with the lowest level. I’ve done what I think is a main quest (with the butcher/baron?) and I’ve moved on from that. I think I’m following his next lead on Ciri. It’s led me to a city they said I needed a pass to enter via the bridge. I swam across, zero consequences. Later got a pass by doing a side quest.

I’m not far into it, but it seems like a pretty long game. I’m hopeful it gets better.