I'm working through a  video that looks at the "phones bad" science, and points out things like-- during the "phones era" when teen suicide went up, also, other things like school shootings went up, and then, when schools closed due to COVID, forcing everyone to be stuck at home, on their phones, teen suicide went DOWN. So there's an argument that BEING AT SCHOOL is causing the harm, NOT phones.

It's such a confusion of correlation/causation that it looks like "phones bad" is just a moral panic.

The whole thing is very depressing. A game that hard-requires an SSD in order to run slowly and boringly.

Ah well, so the Fallout series it is. Which is for the best, I'm really enjoying it.

My favorite bit of FO3 so far was Tenpenny Tower. There was one resident I couldn't get to be okay with Ghouls moving in, so I went away and put points into my speech and personality, but when I tried again, her dialogue options were "locked" ...so I went into the tunnels to explore the other option-- killing the Ghouls (which I didn't want to do). After talking to the Ghouls and them being cool guys, like I suspected, they told me they had a plan for breaking in to the tower and taking it by force. Now, some of the residents were cool, but as a community they were kinda bougie a-holes. So since it was the only thing left to do, I went back to the tower, chatted up Dashwood to get the key to the basement, opened the security gate and let the Ghouls in. Cool battle ensues, they give me a Ghoul mask. I loot the tower for everything I can carry and manage to make a few trade runs while everything is loot-able (before ownership of the tower/objects switches over).

Hilariously, life in the tower continues exactly as before, with the Ghouls simply swapped into the "bougie" role.

The only negative effects are, some of the containers will never be open-able, because the owner/key is gone, and it looks like I'll never be able to get an apartment there.

But.. I'm satisfied that I made buddies with a cool Ghoul in a motorcycle helmet, and he's now running a nice shop that always has ammo. Michael Masters. I'll never get tired of hearing him say, "Go live your life, kid."

...

eta: the main point being, there was a THIRD way to complete a "two options" quest, that the game didn't even suggest was possible until I role-played my characters ethical dilemna, and then it opened up. That's what an RPG should be like.

Happy Monkey, when I built a new gaming rig in 2009, and asked for suggestions, games with beautiful graphics, you suggested either Oblivion or Fallout 3. I still tell this story, because I've spent the next 15 years playing and extensively modding the Elder Scrolls series, from Daggerfall to Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim.

Recently, Bethesda broke Skyrim mods again, with another meaningless software version that forces modders to update the code for thousands of mods. They JUST did this in 2022, and I spent a few weeks, back then, fixing my Skyrim. THIS time, some mod authors are refusing to work on this stupid problem, and I'm scrambling all over github for DLLs, trying to get everything compatible. I spent a few days and couldn't get my save file from 2022 to load. So I downgraded my Skyrim version and tried to re-load my 2022 mods, but this wasn't working either, so I decided, this is not fun anymore.

So anyway, now I'm playing Fallout 3. lol

continued...
On the left pane, used to be able to expand "Watch Later" to view my dozens of curated playlists.

...

THEY'RE F@#CKING GONE.

...

I can, circuitously click my way through multiple clicks and pages to eventually find my playlists, IN THAT AWFUL, HUGE, UNREADABLE GRID FORMAT.

Old: my playlists are right there on the page, I can scroll through them
New: my playlists are hidden, buried under an incomprehensible layer of obfuscation.

MOTHERF#$CKERS
 

continued...
Using a plugin to switch the components back to the original place they've been in for twenty years.
The recommended videos are still HUGE, and they CUT OFF THE SIDE OF THE VIDEO.
When using the plugin to hide recommended videos, the video is still cut off, by the same width strip, now just empty.

You literally have to put videos in theater mode to SEE THE VIDEO.

This is f@#cking senseless and unnecessary. They RUINED something that wasn't broken.
 

even with the plugin, the recommendations are now these HUGE tiles with HUGE GAPS between them

just f#$cking horrible
 

motherf@#@ckers have apparently been "test marketing" this for a few years, which I now know because there are several years of posts about it-- uniformly people HATING IT and asking "HOW DO I CHANGE IT BACK?" --so of course, they rolled it out to everyone. As of now I'm running a Firefox extension to change the UI back-- where COMMENTS --the MAIN THING-- are UNDER the video, and recommendations, the thing I DON'T F@#CKING CARE ABOUT are off to the side.

I have a really, really bad feeling about this. YouTube please for the love of God don't ruin yourself. It's always asking me "try new things?" or "improve your feed?" and.. NO!!! it WORKS the way it is now-- it learns what I want to watch by what I search and what I watch. Do NOT try to change that. IT WORKS ALREADY.

The internet is bad enough now that Reddit is the only webpage that shows up in searches. If they break that, the internet is effectively over. SEARCHING FOR STUFF IS THE ONE JOB IT HAS.

I was near the exclusion zone a few years ago. The thing that struck me the most was how quickly the temperature dropped. It's mind boggling how much heat we're getting from an object that is 93 MILLION miles away!

wow, that's a nice list.
ancient people were like, "fire is weird, right?"
 

that's the best part, the xenophobic scaremongering ... "we're not trying to stop young people from learning about politics*, we're pRoTeCtiNg cHiLdReN from FOREIGNERS (and PHONES)"

* (compounding the issue of not being able to win the popular vote in the last twenty years)

griff wrote:

...wood working equipment...

Lizzie Borden? lol

...

I take your point that screens are ubiquitous. I also think, they're changing us.

It has been proposed that, for spiders who encode information within their webs, those webs could be considered 'a part of' their cognition. I think about this a lot, I have two 6x4 whiteboards in my office where I catalog information my brain can't keep in cache memory, but I keep it in my line of sight, where it can be near instantly re-injected back into my brain's CPU. Those whiteboards are functionally 'a part of' my brain. My phone (Rocketbook app) can snap pics of my whiteboard, OCR a ##filename## and send it to Dropbox (or wherever). Now my brain is everywhere.

Our brains are changing. Getting better, more efficient, but more emotionally dysfunctional. We weren't designed for this.. but, we were never 'designed for' pressing cuneiform into clay tablets, it's just something we figured out, and it stuck. Maybe there's an adjustment period. Maybe we find homeostasis with the new simulus, and the new 'us' is something different than before. I think this is the ostensibly "good" argumment for "human progress."

And we were Darth Vadering ourselves long before silicon chips.
Maybe the worst machinization of an unwilling human physiology is forcing everyone to sleep and wake on the schedule of industrial age factory whistles.
 

that guy was such a goof

I saw a show where they flew over islands, scanning with LIDAR (or something) and found giant Nazi military bases, completely camouflaged, then abandoned, and subsequently being buried under decades of jungle growth.