#true value hardware

[contac]

#k-mart #sears #ace hardware #true value hardware #vhs #1986 #butterfly #gif

[ceyhanmedya]

Hardware

New Post has been published on https://bankakredin.com/what-is-hardware-what-are-external-and-internal-hardware/

Hardware

What is Hardware? What are external and internal hardware?

Hardware is a physical circuit board inside an electronic device. Hardware is generally used to run commands or instructions specified by software.

External and internal hardware

Hardware for computers can be divided into two. Internal hardware is located inside the computer and enables the computer to work. 

External hardware,  on the other hand, is the hardware that increases the user’s experience and is used depending on the need.

Internal hardware

motherboard

As the name suggests, the motherboard is the most basic hardware of the computer. No computer will work without a motherboard. The motherboard has all the hardware on it and enables them to communicate with each other.

Processor

The processor ( CPU ) is one of the most important hardware of a computer, which performs most of the mathematical operations in the computer, also called the brain of the computer. The processor consists of two parts:

Control unit

Most computers are managed by the control unit ( CU ). The control unit uses a binary decoder to convert pre-coded instructions into timing and control signals. 

Arithmetic Logic Unit

With its English definition  , ALU is the unit of the processor that performs arithmetic and logic operations. This unit is indispensable for all processors, from the simplest to the most advanced. 

RAM

Random Access Memory (RAM) is hardware that provides temporary storage services within the computer. Since it is a randomly accessible memory, the data in it is reset when the computer is turned off and on again.

Hard Disk

It is the storage unit of the computer. It is the hardware where all the programs and files installed in the computer, including the operating system, are stored. Since the Hard Disk is a mechanical disk, the reading and writing speed is also low compared to today’s technology. In addition  , HDD  is also susceptible to physical damage. SSD  disks are more durable and faster storage units.

Display card

The external graphics cards in the computer are hardware similar to the processor. Also known as GPU  ( Graphics Processor Unit ), these hardware are externally plugged into the computer to perform graphical operations. External graphics cards are used in computers that need graphics performance.

If the computer does not have an external graphics card, graphical operations are performed by the graphics unit on the processor. Not all processors may have a graphics unit.

external hardware

Monitor

The most basic external hardware required to use the computer is the monitor. Without the monitor

 it will be difficult to operate on the computer and nothing can be displayed. 

gamepad

It is preferred by players to play video games more comfortably. It is not mandatory to use, games can be played with keyboard and mouse.

Keyboard

It transmits the inputs to be made by the user to the computer. The keyboard has keys that represent letters, numbers, and some computer commands.

Mouse

It is the user input hardware used to move the cursor on the computer screen. Classic Mice have two buttons and a wheel. The wheel allows pages to be scrolled up and down.

Components that extend functionality

Some hardware can extend the basic functions of computers. Printers  and  scanners  are used to print or scan photos or documents  . 

With portable hard drives, a lot of information can be easily transferred from one computer to another or old files can be archived. Video and sound cards can also be added for multimedia, which may allow connecting more peripherals depending on the computer’s capabilities.

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[thingsifoundongeoguessr]

trust me bro this is an ace hardware bro please just listen trust me on this one true value isn't real bro this is an ace hardware always has been

#kenosha #wisconsin #united states #geoguessr #things i found on geoguessr #ace hardware #the helpful place #asexual #we make ace jokes as we please round these parts #true value #bad sign

[bettaworldforbettas]

Froggy's Lair biospheres are unhealthy environments for African Dwarf Frogs.

These tanks (which include two African Dwarf Frogs) are not even sold at pet stores; they’re sold at toy stores, flower shops, hardware stores, vape shops, and boutiques.

Even Petco advises a tank that is a minimum of 10 gallons for African Dwarf Frogs.

While this isn’t a betta fish product, it’s an example of how aquatic pets get marketed as easy entertainment and toys for kids. Profit is prioritized above animal welfare and consumers receive wildly inaccurate information about their care.

I’m collaborating with Aquatic Ally Organization and animal advocates to address the sale and production of these harmful Froggy’s Lair biospheres which are sold by retailers like Learning Express, Ace Hardware, Hallmark gift stores, True Value hardware, and more.

These biospheres have and will continue to attract negative attention.

Please sign this petition to learn more and call for an end to these 1/2 gal and 1 gal biospheres.

#african dwarf frog #frog #froggyslair #toystore #animalwelfare #froggy #pet frog #pets #aquatic life #amphibians #frogs #tiktok #petition #inhumane #learningexpresstoys #ace hardware #true value #biosphere #froggyslairbiosphere #aquarium #aquariumhobby

[machine-saint]

the op of that "you should restart your computer every few days" post blocked me so i'm going to perform the full hater move of writing my own post to explain why he's wrong

why should you listen to me: took operating system design and a "how to go from transistors to a pipelined CPU" class in college, i have several servers (one physical, four virtual) that i maintain, i use nixos which is the linux distribution for people who are even bigger fucking nerds about computers than the typical linux user. i also ran this past the other people i know that are similarly tech competent and they also agreed OP is wrong (haven't run this post by them but nothing i say here is controversial).

anyway the tl;dr here is:

you don't need to shut down or restart your computer unless something is wrong or you need to install updates

i think this misconception that restarting is necessary comes from the fact that restarting often fixes problems, and so people think that the problems are because of the not restarting. this is, generally, not true. in most cases there's some specific program (or part of the operating system) that's gotten into a bad state, and restarting that one program would fix it. but restarting is easier since you don't have to identify specifically what's gone wrong. the most common problem i can think of that wouldn't fall under this category is your graphics card drivers fucking up; that's not something you can easily reinitialize without restarting the entire OS.

this isn't saying that restarting is a bad step; if you don't want to bother trying to figure out the problem, it's not a bad first go. personally, if something goes wrong i like to try to solve it without a restart, but i also know way, way more about computers than most people.

as more evidence to point to this, i would point out that servers are typically not restarted unless there's a specific need. this is not because they run special operating systems or have special parts; people can and do run servers using commodity consumer hardware, and while linux is much more common in the server world, it doesn't have any special features to make it more capable of long operation. my server with the longest uptime is 9 months, and i'd have one with even more uptime than that if i hadn't fucked it up so bad two months ago i had to restore from a full disk backup. the laptop i'm typing this on has about a month of uptime (including time spent in sleep mode). i've had servers with uptimes measuring in years.

there's also a lot of people that think that the parts being at an elevated temperature just from running is harmful. this is also, in general, not true. i'd be worried about running it at 100% full blast CPU/GPU for months on end, but nobody reading this post is doing that.

the other reason i see a lot is energy use. the typical energy use of a computer not doing anything is like... 20-30 watts. this is about two or three lightbulbs worth. that's not nothing, but it's not a lot to be concerned over. in terms of monetary cost, that's maybe $10 on your power bill. if it's in sleep mode it's even less, and if it's in full-blown hibernation mode it's literally zero.

there are also people in the replies to that post giving reasons. all of them are false.

temporary files generally don't use enough disk space to be worth worrying about

programs that leak memory return it all to the OS when they're closed, so it's enough to just close the program itself. and the OS generally doesn't leak memory.

'clearing your RAM' is not a thing you need to do. neither is resetting your registry values.

your computer can absolutely use disk space from deleted files without a restart. i've taken a server that was almost completely full, deleted a bunch of unnecessary files, and it continued fine without a restart.

#i just had to get this out of my mind

[disturbedgerblin]

"Listeners, as I speak we are winding down to the final hours of a momentous occasion. For the second time, I am a contender for some sort of internet sexy gentleman award. An award for which I will gain nothing but online clout and the value of which--as far as I know--is not fungible in any known countries, dimensions, or time paradoxes. As before, everything comes down to the results of an internet poll. Truly the greatest tool of democracy, with the exception of those neat little 'I voted' stickers."

"But the outcome of this poll is of little concern to me. Because right now the sexiest man I know is at home, fast asleep on our couch. Curled up on his steadily rising chest is a cat that is there but is not there. The TV remote control is steadily slipping out of his hand. He is snoring now, but moments before, that man was watching the Last of Us show before falling asleep. Except not really because zombie stories frustrate him because they 'aren't based in science, Cecil,' and 'I've already synthesized five different antidotes in the event of a zombie outbreak, Cecil.' But he will watch the episodes anyway, because he knows I love zombie flicks, and I am scared of zombie flicks. And he will let me know when I should avert my eyes before a jumpscare is about to happen. How can you get any sexier than that?"

"A wise man at Ace Hardware Store once imparted these wise words: 'Measure twice, cut once.' He said this as he was purchasing a lot of plywood, so I'm assuming he had measured once, realized he had made an error after cutting and had to get more material--but his words still ring true. A poll measured once only reveals a snippet of what makes a sexyman sexy. It does not delve into the depth of legacy, the weight of experience, the height of thirst. Sexiness comes in many shapes and sizes. It takes two to tango, and three to cut a mango. And that's why I never cut my fruit alone."

"Listeners, I hope that after tonight, when all is said and done, you take a moment to look in the mirror, wave to the faceless woman staring back at you, and appreciate the tumblr sexyman that was inside all of us, all along. Good night, Night Vale. Good night. "

#wtnv #tumblr sexyman #cecilsweep #welcome to nightvale #unreality tw #my writing

[softcuddledrone]

So theoretically if someone were too, I don’t know, go to the cafe and wish to become a cuddledrone, how would the process go exactly? Asking for. A friend. [the friend is me]

Apologies in advance bc this is going to be a long ramble

Initial contact with Miss Manager (the proxy), undergo an interview so management can get a feel for your intentions and desires. Hypnosis to get a deeper look at true desires is optional but ultimately an opt-in step.

A contract is drawn up to determine the duration of one's employment within the Cafe (reviewed and renewed annually; the majority of the contract is favored heavily towards the soon-to-be-cuddledrone's autonomy (should it want it returned).

Congratulations! You have been accepted into the Cuddledrone Cafe! Don't celebrate just yet though, as there is approximately one entire filing cabinet worth of paperwork to process. Don't worry, Miss Manager (and a small squad of maid-drones) will be there to explain every line as needed. Notable points in this mountain of forms includes purchasing and absolving any debts, granting temporary retainership for any associated property related contracts, arranging for movers to put any property into controlled storage, consent forms for present and future medical services (general healthcare, augmentation of any and many kinds), and general bureaucratic formalities towards never having to worry about anything and let Mistress take care of you

At this point some opt to directly proceed to augmentation! The process starts with a lengthy physical to find any and all issues to be addressed through surgery, medication, conditioning, or augmentations. Following that is the 'fun' part of the cuddledrone standard augmentation suite, which includes but is not limited to a neurological network node implant, top-grade cybernetic limbs, and anything else the new cuddledrone needs (or wants). Any augmentations post-'graduation' can either be kept or replaced free of charge for hardware of equivalent value.

Heavy augmentations over a relatively short period of time can be intensive, and requires rest, recovery, and acclimation to both the physical and cognitive aspects of new limbs and joining the sensory network. Freshly minted cuddledrones are expected and encouraged to take as much time as they need in the backrooms before assuming duties as a full-fledged cuddledrone. This also gives ample time to get to know the other drones, get used to the new diet (delicious and plentiful), pick up a hobby (enrichment is important!), get your brain rewired a few times, and so on.

Congratulations, you are now a proper cuddledrone! Enjoy your days caught in the bliss of a network feedback loop of tactile stimulation and drug-induced bliss!

#SOFTIEposting #soft dronekink #This is really long and crunchy sorry

[secretgamergirl]

How a Computer Works - Part 2 (Logic and Memory)

For those coming in late, I am writing a text-only explainer of how a computer works, starting from the absolute basics of running a current through various electronic components. We covered that much, and the reasons I'm doing this, back in part 1, where we also sort of left off on a glib little cliffhanger about how once you have logic gates, you're there, right? Well the thing of it is, getting to a point where you can easily make all the basic logic gates actually was really huge, historically, because the next big step to making a computer was already handled by weird math nerds hundreds of years before the physical hardware to make a computer was properly available.

As far back as 1705, math nerds were publishing papers on binary math. That was based on nerding out over the I Ching if you really want to trace things back, and the first time anyone really sat down and tried to build purely mechanical computers was back in the 1800s they had this all figured out to the point where I'm looking at a diagram from Ada Lovelace in 1842 that definitely covers more than I'm going to get to here. So, let's start catching up there. First though, as always, I have to remind you this blog is basically my job right now, and I'm dependent on some percentage of the people reading these posts to go throw me some money on patreon to continue to be alive, so I can write stuff like this.

Logic Gates

We talked earlier about the actual physical components needed to physically build a computer, at least of the sorts we've been using for the past hundred years or so. But really, all you need to make a computer is logic gates, a way to plug values in them, and a way for them to show some sort of output. We're doing that with clever tricks to make conditional electrical connections, but you can use anything, really. Clockwork, falling water, migratory crabs stepping on pressure plates, groups of people agreeing to poke each other's shoulders, or just mathing it all out on paper. All you really need is a consistent way to set up all the fundamental logic gates... and math nerds will note that there's a couple you can build all the others from if you're in a real bind.

So let's go over them again real quick. All of these take two inputs and give an output. We can call those inputs "on or off" "flowing or still" "yes or no" "true or false" or of course the popular "1 or 0." In terms of a computer, as we build them, the first option for the inputs is "if I follow the electrons getting pulled this way all the way down, I'm going to hit a big relatively positive charge" and our output is going to (hopefully) lead towards a big negative charge so we'll have a complete circuit and lights will like and all that. Again, we are going to just ignore how the actual movement of electrons is totally doing the opposite of what we're calling "input" and "output" here. You could build logic components where things really move the way that makes intuitive sense but... we didn't, and we're stuck with that.

So the first and easiest gate we have is the OR gate. An OR gate takes its two inputs, and it's looking for at least one that's on/yes/true/1 whatever you want to call it, and if it has that, it's going to pass it along as it's output. So like, we've got two wires coming in, if either or both is connected to a positive charge, we're passing that connection along, maybe through an LED so it can light up and she how cool we are on the way to a negative charge, but if neither connects to a positive, we're not lighting our light, so, we're passing along off/no/false/0. Simple. Gonna stick to just saying 1 and 0 past here for reasons of laziness. So, 0+0=0, 1+0=1, etc. But maybe we don't use + because that gets confusing with actual addition. So we'll just say 0 or 0 outputs 0. 1 or 0 outputs 1. 0 or 1 outputs 1. 1 or 1 outputs 1.

Then we've got AND gates. Here we pass along our 1 or whatever you want to call it if and only if both our inputs are 1. Just one or the other isn't going to cut it, it's gotta be both. 0&0 outputs 0. 1&0 outputs 0. 0&1 outputs 0. 1&1 outputs 1.

Then we've got the oddball of XOR, or exclusive or. If it wasn't a bunch of STEM people naming these we'd probably say like, "either" vs. "and/or" but this is for when we want exactly one of our inputs to be 1, not both. So, 0 xor 0 outputs 0. 1 xor 0 outputs 1. 0 xor 1 outputs 1. 1 xor 1 outputs 0.

Then we've got the evil twins of those, NOR, NAND, and XNOR. These give the exact opposite outputs their N-less cousins do. 0 nor 0 outputs 1. 1 nor 0 outputs 0. 0 nor 1 outputs 0. 1 nor 1 outputs 0. NAND outputs a 1 any time it isn't getting two 1s. XNOR is particularly badly named since it's outputting a 1 if and only if its inputs are the same as each other and "SAME" would both make more sense and have the same number of characters, but conventions are what they are.

Anyway, point is, if we can construct these six things and string them together, we have all our bases covered on every sort of behavior we could possibly want in terms of taking two inputs and spitting out an output, but the only immediately obvious use case there is if you want to hook multiple light switches up to control a single bulb in various ways and really screw with people trying to figure out what's up when they enter a room and flip a switch, right?

Well, we could also throw some diodes in and branch off from each switch into multiple gates controlling multiple lights with different switch combinations with each bulb following different logic. Especially when you remember that we can use the output of any given gate as the input to another, but what about something actually useful?

The Incredible Power of the S-R Latch

So... here's an actually useful thing we can do. We can store a value for later by looping it in with itself. Check it out, they call this sucker a set-reset, or S-R Latch, and all we need is to take two NOR gates, branch a wire off the output of each, and cross that over to be an input of the other NOR gate. So gate A is taking what we're going to call our Set wire as one input, and gate B's output as the other, and gate 2's going to take what we're going to call our Reset wire, and the output from gate 1. So uh, what does that do?

Well, let's do the math here. If we're just feeding 0s into S and R, then gate A is getting a 0 and let's say, for now, a 0. It's a NOR gate, so feeding in two 0s outputs a 1. So... gate B is getting a 0 from R, and 1 from gate A, so yeah, it was in fact putting out a 0. Hooray, that guess was right, nothing funky's going on here.

Now just for kicks, let's hold down a button for a second to connect to something and make S a 1. OK, NOR gate A now has a 1 and a 0, so it's outputting a 0... and gate B is taking that 0 and the 0 it had from R, so, it's a 1 now, and that 1 goes back to gate A, so gate A has two 1s, which doesn't change how it's putting out a 0 so, no further changes to keep track of there.

Well cool, let me just let go of this button then. Oh well NOW instead of getting a 1 and a 1, NOR gate A is getting a 0 and a 1... but whatever, it's still outputting 0. It's gonna keep outputting a 0 unless it has two 1s after all, that's what a NOR gate does, and uh... huh. It's kinda stuck now isn't it. Doesn't matter if S is a 0 or a 1, gate A is stuck outputting a 0 and gate B is stuck outputting a 1! Gate B is the output we care about here if that wasn't clear. We've rigged it up so that yeah, if there's ever a point where S gets pulled positive/set true/set to 1/turns on, that output gets stuck as the same, and the only way to get it back to a 0 is to go and put a 1 into R. The whole thing's symmetrical so we shouldn't have to step through all this. A ends up outputting 1, so B ends up outputting 0, and R no longer matters.

Well that's all pretty cool, but hey, just to be thorough, what happens if we put a 1 on both S and R at the same time? Well, if A was outputting 1 B gets two 1s, so it outputs a 0 to A, so that's a 1 and 0 for A so it gives B a 0 so B gives A a 1 so A gives B a 0 so... oh we broke it didn't we! In pure logic land this is some sort of paradox. In real life there aren't really any 0s and 1s just wires at different charges and components that don't work right when those aren't steadily in certain ranges so... it resolves SOMEHOW but uh... let's maybe avoid this whole situation.

The S-R latch sucks! Let's make a D flip-flop!

Well one simple thing we can do is have another input wire in the mix, we call it Enable, and we AND it with S and R before we send them into the latch so a 1 can only get in there if we give it the green light. That seems like a good sort of design to use with everything we do with these gates actually. When a wire's going towards a cool setup let's AND it with an enable signal that has to have a 1 or else it's going to stay giving a 0, keep it from getting up to anything. Maybe more than one enabler even.

You know what else would be nice though? If we didn't need two to send a 1 down one wire to store a 1, and a 1 down another to store a 0. If we're doing this whole Enable signal thing and making sure nothing happens otherwise, what if we just like, branched off our set wire, ran that through an inverter, and put that into R? That'd just make it so we can have some sort of Data line with whatever value on it, and whenever we turn on Enable it gets stored, right? Now it's a D latch.

Plus we're never going to have a 1 on both of those inputs, right? Well see, this is one of those situations where we have to deal with the whole perfect logic of 0s and 1s thing doesn't quit fit with reality. It takes SOME time for that inverter to invert (and technically some time for signals to travel along these wires, but less when there aren't neat components). So turns out if you have a wire branch out, send one end through an inverter, then plug both into say an AND gate, every time you change what's on that wire there's going to be this super short little burst of a 1 coming out of that AND. That's very inconvenient for us right now, but it's a cool hacky trick to have in our pocket if we ever want to time something to just do something real quick at the very moment the voltage on a wire shifts from low to high.

We can pull the same sort of trick with a capacitor then a resistor going to a low. Also I should never say "at the very moment." There's values on all these components and mathematical relationships, and when you're really building these things and needing precision timing (because with a computer we want things happening in a very specific order, but VERY FAST) you need to actually do that math. And you know, it's actually very handy for out purposes of avoiding that 1 on both inputs issue if we do something like that, so OK, new design from the top here just for a clean visualization:

We've got a line with our clock signal (I'll get to that in a moment). We run that through the capacitor-resistor-to-negative setup to get this quick little pulse every time the clock line ticks up to positive. Now we split that out to AND gates A and B. We've also got a Data line, it's gonna have whatever. We also split that off, one line going to gate A, the other going through an inverter and into gate B. AND gate A's output goes into an input for NOR gate A, along with the output from NOR gate B. AND gate B's output goes into NOR gate B along with NOR gate A's output. You can wrap all that up in a little box now and so long as we remember to make changes to that data line out of sink with the rising edge of our clock signal, this all works super great. Change the data, pulse the clock, data gets latched in to our new thing we're calling a D flip-flop. We've got a wire coming out the other end from NOR gate B's output that's just gonna hold whatever value until the next time the clock pulses and we check our input again, and we can use AND gates to skip the check if we don't want to read a new value in, or don't want to send that new value off somewhere else.

What's this about a clock?

OK, so, we want our computer to do stuff. Our computer can really only ever do one thing at a time, because the only thing it can really do is latch values into setups like we have above and messing with two inputs being positive can make logic gates go screwy. So like we already did with the D flip-flop we can totally time things along the rising and falling edges of a charge flipping constantly between high and low values, and time everything off that. And we don't even need to do any extra work for that because it JUST SO HAPPENS that smart people worked this all out before any of your fancy transistors were even a thing and the electricity comes right out of your wall in this neat sine wave pattern that peaks 50 or 60 times a second depending what part of the world you're in on the assumption that any electronics that need any sort of timing can work with that.

And I mean that actually is true but screw that we're building a computer. We rig something up to convert that to DC and then we pump that into a chunk of quartz or something. See there's this thing called the piezoelectric effect where the structure of certain kinds of crystals makes them change shape when you run electricity through them then snap back and release it. So you grow a quartz crystal exactly how you want it and lock it up in a little box and run electricity through it, and it'll start twitching away in there at a speed dependent on the voltage, and you just hook in another wire and you get these nice steady alternating high low pulses. Or something close enough to that anyway.

And we're "reading values in" and "passing them along" how?

So we talked about enable lines before right? Like with our D flip-flop there, where we ended up only committing changes to what was latched in when there was a clock pulse? It's easy enough to just have more AND gates for more conditions. Like let's say for the sake of argument and convenient numbers we set up, oh, 8 of those D flip-flops. They each have their own data line, they're sharing a clock, and we're throwing another AND in on the clock line to a shared Read Enable line. We have a 0 there, nothing's going to happen. We have a 1, things will happen when the clock pulses, specifically we latch in whatever's on the data line. Now let's also have an Output Enable line, and we'll AND that in with the output of every flip-flop, and in the interest of being lazy, let's have each flip-flop's output just loop back and connect to it's own data input line... maybe have some diodes in there so it's a one way loop, we probably have some in here but you know, best practices.

Anyway let's take some really really long and we'll call these our bus lines. Each of our 8 data line connects to a bus line. Elsewhere in the computer, anywhere else we're going to have data sitting around in fact, those also connect to these 8 bus lines. We might have a set of 8 flip-flops to hold some set of data for just a little bit, or for a long time, or connected to some switches or buttons, or just some LEDs or other kind of output, whatever. Everything connects to the bus, and everything has enable lines to pull in whatever values are on the bus and to push out whatever onto the bus. We definitely don't want have more than one thing trying to push stuff out at a time, we also definitely want to do that whole pull-down resistor thing to make sure everything on the bus defaults to 0 if we aren't feeding in a 1, and we probably don't want to be reading from the bus at the exact moment the data on it is changing as a best practices thing, ideally, but oh, quick sidetrack there.

Let's say we have some a clump of these flipflops, we call that register A, we have another we call register B, and we build some little module that treats what's in both of those like an 8 bit number and adds them together, we call the output of that our sum register. And say we get lazy, we leave the sum register's output enabled, A's input enabled, and we've just go 00000001 stored in B. Now every time the clock pulses and updates our math function, the sum increases by 1, feeds right back into A, and the whole thing ends up counting up at the speed of the clock. There's simpler ways to make something count up, but, hey it's a thing you can do. And a thing you probably don't want to do, so don't leave those pins enabled all over.

In fact, if you really wanted to be safe, you'd maybe want to just like put a pull-down on every enable line and have them all lead to a big control zone where you're just sitting there holding a live positive wire in your hand and touching it to whatever one thing you want enabled at a time. Seems like a pain though.

Why not use an addressing system?

OK, so how about this? What if we organize everything so we've got like, our big longterm memory area, and we have a bunch of these registers of a flip-flop for every line on the bus, and then instead of a simple enable pin for each register, we have a unique little access code for each? Let's have oh... 4 dedicated data lines just for managing these, right? So one of these is oh, memory address 1001. So we just have lines carrying those values, and we XNOR those with our address lookup lines, then we AND all those together, and use THAT for our enable.

I already covered how XNOR makes way more sense if we just call it SAME instead, right? We're only going to pass a 1 to the set of ANDs at the end if we've got a 1 and we're getting another 1, or we've got a 0 and we're getting another 0, and if we pass a single 0 to the ANDs, they clam up and don't enable things, but if we pass the whole value, we're in.

We can use a similar address coding thing to activate cool little function models too. Like that thing I mentioned in the tangent for doing addition? We have some operation code to enable to output on whatever memory register has a number we care about and make register A in that math module read it in. Another to plug a value into B. Another to output the sum to some memory address we want to store it in. We can set it up so these get checked for if someone sets toggle switches corresponding to the code and locks it in with an enable button, or hey, we can set up one of those big blocks of addressed memory, lay the whole sequence of actions we want out in that in sequential addresses, and then just have some function that adds 1 to itself every clock cycle as a line counter, and enable the outputs of our program counter to dump out those stored commands out to our opcode and memory address lines when their number gets called at the deli, as it were. Hey, make one of the commands write to the program stepper and it can even skip around.

And... there you go. That's how a computer works. There's more stuff I could, and probably could cover, like how to rig up a program counter and an addition module and maybe some sort of real output display. Not to mention how to actually, practically, compress all of this into a reasonable space so you don't just have a few thousand transistors soldered together in a giant tangle with the nightmare of keeping contacts from touching. I'll probably get to at least some of that in some future part 3. In the meantime, I learned most of what I'm sharing here by actually for real building my own computer using a kit and series of instructional videos from eater.net which is just the homepage of some cool guy who, yeah, posts long explainer videos on this stuff and sells electronics kits you can follow along with. I don't have any advertising deal going here or anything, he's just genuinely a good extra source of info for getting your head around this stuff. And again, if you thought this was a cool read or you're just feeling generous, throw me a little money maybe?

CONTINUED IN PART 3

#computers #computer science #logic gates #electronics #education

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How Amazon transformed the EU into a planned economy

Amazon is a perfect parable of enshittification, the process by which platforms first offer subsidies to end users until they’re locked in, then make life good for business customers at users’ expense, until they’re locked in, then claw back all the value they can for themselves, leaving just enough behind to keep the lock-in going.

In a new report for SOMO, Margarida Silva describes how the end-stage enshittification of Amazon is playing out in the EU, with Amazon repeating its US playbook of gouging the small businesses who have no choice but to use the platform in order to reach its locked-in customers, making European customers and European sellers poorer:

https://www.somo.nl/amazons-european-chokehold/

The mechanism for this isn’t a mystery. Amazon boasts about it! They call it their flywheel: first, customers are lured into the platform with low prices, especially through Prime, which requires pre-payment for a year’s shipping, which virtually guarantees that customers will start their shopping on Amazon. Because customers now start their buying on Amazon, sellers have to be there. The increased range of goods for sale on Amazon lures in more buyers, who lure in more sellers, with both sides holding each other hostage:

https://vimeo.com/739486256/00a0a7379a

This flywheel creates a vicious cycle, starving local retail so that customers can’t get what they need from brick-and-mortar shops, which funnels sellers into offering their goods for sale on Amazon. The less choice customers and sellers have about where they shop, the more Amazon can abuse both to pad its own bottom line.

There are 800,000 EU-based sellers on Amazon, and they have seen the junk-fees that Amazon charges them skyrocket, to the point where they have to raise prices or lose money on each sale. Amazon uses both tacit and explicit “Most Favored Nation” deals to hide these price-hikes. Under an MFN deal, sellers must not allow their goods to be sold at a lower price than Amazon’s — so when they raise prices to cover Amazon’s increasing fees, they raise them everywhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/

It’s not hard to understand why Amazon would raise its fees: the company has an effective e-commerce monopoly. Like Ozymandias, they have run out of worlds to conquer, and so their growth has to come from squeezing suppliers and/or raising prices, not from bringing in new customers. This is likewise true of mobile companies like Apple and Google, who have run out of people who are so excited about incremental mobile hardware gains that they’ll buy a new phone every year, which means that growth has to come from squeezing app vendors:

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2023/06/09/Pixel-4-to-7

This is likewise true of the streaming companies, which is why Netflix is cracking down on “password sharing”:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes

It’s true of the movie studios, which is why they want to zero out their wage bills by replacing writers with automatic plausible sentence generators that will write stupid movies that they think we’ll still pay to see because there won’t be anything else:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/06/people-are-not-disposable/#union-strong

It’s certainly true of Uber, which is why they’ve double the cost of a taxi ride and halved the wages they pay drivers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Monopolies “grow” by making their customers and suppliers worse off. But they have to be careful about this: if it’s obvious that you’re using your market power to screw buyers, you can get in trouble with competition regulators. That’s because the only part of antitrust law that the neoliberal project left intact is “consumer welfare” — the idea that monopolies should only face enforcement when they raise prices and/or lower quality:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/10/play-fair/#bedoya

This focus on price-hikes has given monopolists a free hand to squeeze suppliers and workers, because a monopolist — from Walmart to Amazon — can claim that squeezing your workers and suppliers is necessary to enhancing consumer welfare. The less you pay to produce a product, the cheaper you can price it.

When a company has a lot of seller power, we call it a monopolist. When it has a lot of buying power, we call it a monopsonist. No one ever made a bestselling, family-destroying board game called “Monopsony” so most people haven’t heard of the concept. But monopsony is every bit as dangerous as monopoly, and monopsonists find it far easier to acquire market power than monopolists. Few suppliers can afford to have even 10% of their sales disappear overnight, so a buyer who accounts for 10% of your sales can demand deep discounts and other favorable terms.

Amazon is a monopolist, but it’s also a very powerful and ruthless monopsonist. For example, its audiobook division, Audible, has a 90+% market-share, and it used that market-power to steal at least $100m from audiobook creators, in a scandal dubbed Audiblegate:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

For Europe’s 800k sellers who rely on Amazon to reach their customers, the monoposony conditions are blatant and shameless. Take listing fees: Amazon’s “flywheel” pitch claims that as the company grows, it achieves “economies of scale” that can lower its cost basis. But Amazon’s listing fees haven’t changed, even as the company experienced explosive growth in the EU (remember, sellers whose Amazon fees exceed their margins have to pass those fees onto buyers, and also raise their prices everywhere else to satisfy the Most Favored Nation requirement).

Amazon books the revenues from these fees — and other junk-fees it extracts from sellers — in Luxembourg, an EU member nation that provides a tax haven to multinational businesses that want to maintain the fiction that they operate their businesses out of the tiny kingdom. There is sharp competition in the EU to offer the most servile, corrupt environment for multinationals, and Luxembourg is a leader, along with Cyprus, Malta and, of course, Ireland:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

But at least listing fees haven’t gone up, unlike other fees, which have climbed sharply. Amazon falsely claimed that its additional revenues from fees were the result of growth by independent sellers, which Amazon pegged at 65%. Later, the company admitted that the true growth figure was 22%. Meanwhile, fees are up 85%.

The true growth figure might be lower still. Amazon refuses to show the math behind its growth figures, or even say which sellers and sales are included in the figure.

The SOMO report cites research by Juozas Kaziukėnas of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, who finds that sellers are now giving 50% of their gross revenues to Amazon, an increase of 10% over the past five years across the whole EU. However, different EU (and ex-EU) countries have experienced much steeper increases in fees — in the UK, fees have nearly doubled (up 98%), and in France, fees more than doubled (up 115%).

Many of these increases come from the Fulfilment By Amazon (FBA) program, which is promoted as an optional service, but which is really obligatory — careful research shows that sellers who warehouse, pack and ship their own goods get banished to the depths of search results, even if they have ratings, costs and times that are competitive with FBA. This is especially true of the “buy box” that lands at the top of most searches. The company refuses to disclose how buy box positioning is determined, but 90% of products in the buy box pay for FBA.

Amazon has used excuseflation to hike its FBA prices, blaming higher energy prices for price hikes that predated the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and blaming covid for price hikes that predated the pandemic.

Italy’s competition authority did yeoman service in uncovering the sleaze of FBA, publishing an investigation that showed that Prime and buy box made the notionally “optional” FBA into a must-have for merchants, meaning that Amazon could jack up FBA prices without losing business.

Another notable source of gouging came in response to the UK and France adopting digital services taxes, which were meant to make up for the tax-base erosion enabled by Luxembourg’s flouting of EU tax law. Amazon passed these taxes straight through to its merchants, without seeing a comparable decrease in the number of sellers using its platforms — an unmistakable sign of market power. If you can raise prices without losing customers, then, by definition, your customers have nowhere else to go.

I’ve previously written about how Amazon’s $31b/year “advertising” market isn’t really advertising — rather, it’s a payola scheme that auctions off the top of a search-listing to the merchant with the most to spend:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is how you get a simple search like “cat beds” returning results whose first screen is 100% ads, and whose next five screens are 50% ads, many of them for dog products:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2022/amazon-shopping-ads/

Auctioning off search results means that every time you search for something you want, you have to wade through screen after screen of listings for products whose vendors spent more on advertising, leaving less to spend on making quality goods.

This is as true in the EU as it is in the USA. The SOMO report shows that European merchants are required to spend ever-larger sums to show up in results for the exact products they sell, leaving them with a choice between making less money, raising prices, or skimping on quality.

But even the “winners” of Amazon’s gladiatorial combat among vendors can still lose. Amazon uses an automated product removal process that can delete some or all of a merchant’s products, without warning or explanation, and no one at Amazon will explain what a merchant did wrong. That remains true even if a vendor pays for Amazon’s “marketplace consultant” service — ask these paid Virgils why you’ve been cast into Amazon’s pit, and they’ll shrug their shoulders (and bill you for it).

And even if you can navigate the junk fees, the Kafka-as-a-service removals, the war of all sellers against all sellers for search primacy…you still lose. Merchants told SOMO that a product that survives Amazon’s gauntlet is likely to be cloned by Amazon and sold as an Amazon Basic or other house-brand product. Amazon doesn’t charge itself 50% junk fees, so it can always underprice the vendors it knocks off, and give its own products permanent top-of-search placement.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once testified under oath before Congress that this doesn’t happen — and then refused to return to Congress when multiple vendors showed evidence that he’d lied:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/18/amazon-congress-letter-third-party-data/

He definitely lied:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-india-rigging/

Amazon has faced investigations and enforcement in the EU over this, and settled a claim with a promise to “not use non-public seller data to compete with sellers,” but given the company’s record of broken promises on this score and the difficulty of catching them cheating, it’s pretty naive to think they’ll stick to this.

The report quotes Thomas Höppner, a lawyer who has represented small businesses that Amazon screwed over. Höppner says the problem is that the EU evaluates Amazon’s bad deeds on a “case-by-case” basis, missing the big picture: “By the time one identified problem was seemingly solved, Amazon had long made amendments elsewhere with the same effect. We require a more holistic approach that considers the entire Amazon ecosystem and the various interdependencies within.”

But the EU’s enforcement approach is about to change significantly. The EU just passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which imposes a bunch of obligations on Amazon:

allowing sellers to offer their products on other marketplaces at different prices (Article 5.3),

not obliging business users to pay for one of its services in order to use its platform (Article 5.8),

limiting the way Amazon uses non-public seller data to compete with them (Article 6.2)

preventing Amazon from giving top billing in search results to its own products or sellers that have acquired extra Amazon services (Article 6.5)

The report concludes with a suite of recommendations for improving EU enforcement. First, they argue for a return to traditional competition law, abandoning the “consumer welfare standard” that is so friendly to monopsonies and their abuses of suppliers and workers.

They call for a probe into Amazon’s Most Favored Nation deals (“fair pricing policy”), the practice of sponsoring search results, and spiraling fees. They want the EU to adequately fund DMA enforcement, with “measures to prevent regulatory capture.” And they want Amazon to publish clear explanations for how search results, buy box placement, and other practices hidden behind a veil of secrecy.

Amazon will doubtless claim that disclosing how those systems work will make it easier for spammers and scammers to game their way to the top of search results. We should be skeptical of this claim — content moderation is the last domain where anyone takes the bankrupt idea of security through obscurity seriously:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Finally, the report calls for breaking up Amazon, forcing it to choose between being a platform seller or a platform user, calling this the only way to “prevent the conflicts of interest between its role as a platform intermediary, seller, and service provider.”

The technical term for this measure is “structural separation” — a rule that bans platform companies from competing with their business customers. This is the principle at work in the US bipartisan AMERICA Act, which would force Google and Meta to spin off the parts of their ad-tech business that put them in a conflict of interest. Right now, Googbook represents both publishers and advertisers, while operating the marketplace where ad sales take place, and they take 51% out of every ad dollar:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Structural separation hasn’t really been applied in the US for a generation, but it’s gained currency in recent years, for the obvious reason that the referee can’t also own one of the teams. I was in Germany last week speaking to regulators and politicians, and they espoused skepticism that the EU would embrace structural separation anytime soon.

But they were wrong! Today, the European Commission announced plans to force Google and Meta to sell off their conflict-of-interest ad-tech lines of business, mirroring the provisions of the US AMERICA Act:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/google-may-soon-be-ordered-to-break-up-its-lucrative-ad-business-eu-warns/

Structural separation really is the policy we should be demanding. It’s amazing that lawyers who would never argue a case in front of a judge who was married to the plaintiff will turn around and defend the idea that Amazon can fairly operate a marketplace where they compete with other sellers.

With Amazon dominating online sales, and with in-person retail cratering, Amazon’s decisions have the power to determine the outcome of whole swathes of Europe’s economy. This is the “planned economy” that the EU claims it detests and seeks to prevent — but it’s an economy planned by distant autocrats in a Seattle boardroom, for the purpose of extracting the surpluses needed to launch an endless procession of penis-rockets.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this postto read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/14/flywheel-shyster-and-flywheel/#unfulfilled-by-amazon

[Image ID: A desert ruin. In the foreground is a huge Amazon box, with an EU flag in place of its shipping label. Atop the box are the feet and partial legs of an Oxymandias figure.]

Image: Rama (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gladiator_with_sword-Louis_Ernest_Meissonnier-MG_1216-IMG_1223-white.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/fr/deed.en

#pluralistic #payola #digital markets act #dma #Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations #planned economies #kafka-tech #fba #Luxembourg #amazon #enshittification #monopsony #chokepoint capitalism #Margarida Silva #flywheel #eu #fulfillment by amazon #junk fees #ad-tech #somo

[mandoalorian]

come back, be here

word count: 1,400

warnings: death of a family member, brief mention of alcohol & smoking

authors note: based of that one “you came?” / “you called” tiktok sound that @evanthefunky just informed me is actually from the sandman ! i haven’t posted a fic in a long time— like, over 6 months for sure. this is a bit daunting for me to come back like this but writing has always provided me with a route of escapism and it’s a hobby i hope i can find more time for. hope you enjoy this one shot!

masterlist || javier peña masterlist

The only thing holding Javier back from leaving Texas and joining the DEA was you. Quite frankly, he was happy to get away from the ranch and his father and his shitty boss at the hardware store. But the thought of leaving you… leaving the warmest bed he’d ever known… well, it made Javier sick.

How could one leave their childhood best friend? Their one true love?

“You’re doing the right thing Javi,” you remember smiling through the affliction as you held onto him at the busy airport gate. “You have to chase your dreams. So do it. And don’t look back.”

“I just wish you could come with me.” Javier frowned, giving your hand a tight squeeze.

“Me too,” you replied with a small sniff. “But you know I have to take care of my grandma, she needs me. Just like the DEA needs you. This is your calling.”

Javier sighed and tapped his feet impatiently. “What if it’s not—“ he was worrying out loud now, torn between the direction of his heart and the logic of his brain. “—what if my calling is to just be a rancher like dad and make you my wife. We can have a bunch of kids and a dog and white picket fence. Maybe some chickens too. I can stay. I want to stay, really. I…”

You sigh and shake your head, pressing your index finger to his lips to silence him. “You’re being crazy, Javi. Please don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

Before Javi can respond, the lady on the intercom makes an announcement.

“Flight 187 to Bogotá, Colombia now boarding from Terminal 3A.”

“You have to go now.” You nudge him.

“I don’t—“

“Javi. Go.” You demand.

“But—“

“This is an amazing opportunity and I will not be the person who stops you from pursuing your dream. Now go.”

Javier grabs his bags and suitcase and pulls away from you. “I’ll write to you all the time. And if you need anything just call. I’ll be there. I promise.”

You and Javi write back and forth for about two weeks before he shares with you just how busy work is and how he got a job on a very high profile case that’s been consuming his every waking hour. You raise concern when he admits that he spends his evenings in bars and has started picking up a daily pack of Marlboro. He always smoked but he was smart about it, and you were aware of his tendency to spiral when things got rough. But Javi made all the effort to reassure you that he was okay.

His writing gets sparse in the Summer but he still makes an effort. It’s hard on him and it’s hard on you.

You hold no bad blood or resentment towards Javier when he stops writing to you. It was inevitable. He’s living a new life now. He’s living his dream.

But deep down, he was just waiting for his invitation to come back home. To come back to you.

It‘s almost ten years later when you call Javier.

You notify him through uncontrollable sobs that your grandmother has passed away. He knew her well enough. She’d practically brought you up. He felt your pain through the line of the telephone and his heart ached to be with you.

“I’m sorry Javi, it’s late. And I’m sorry for disturbing you when you’re so busy. I just didn’t know who else to call. I didn’t know— I don’t know what to do—“

“I’m here.” he soothes, yearning to hold you and comfort you through this period of mourning. The words hold very little value and if anything, they just hurt you more.

“But you’re not.” you whisper, your voice just shy of a desperate croak.

You had never felt more alone.

Approximately thirty hours after the phone call to Javier, you find yourself trimming the weeds by your front porch in the home you had lived in your whole life. You scratch your finger on a rose thorn and wince, immediately rising to your feet and heading inside to rinse the blood away and apply a bandaid on the injury.

But before you can even take a step in the direction of your front door, you hear a voice that is all too familiar.

Your name is spoken and your entire body freezes up. A moment passes— you’re not quite sure how long exactly— before the next two words are uttered. “I’m here.”

It’s serves as both reassurance and a reminder. And it doesn’t hurt anymore. But your feet are glued to the concrete ground and you can’t even turn to face the man who’d been gone for so long. The man who you believed may never return.

When you don’t move or acknowledge him, he calls your name again and this time his tone is breathy— almost exasperated. Your eyes are wide and brimmed with glossy tears and a small hiccup escapes your lips.

Finally you gain the courage of your convictions spin on your heel.

It’s him.

It’s really him.

Your Javier.

He looks the same. Still ever so handsome, with the hair above his lip groomed so perfectly and his eyes shining like pools of mocha. He even dresses the same, you notice, making sure to spot the pink collar of his shirt and the tight blue jeans that tug around his thighs.

You feel your heart begin to race and you precariously try to regulate your breathing. This was it. This was all you ever wanted. His face softens and his expression speaks a thousand words. A crinkle of concern burrows between his brow and his pink lips tug into a frown as he risks a step closer to you, breaking the very little distance you once shared.

Javier takes notice of the rapid movements of your chest and briefly, he worries about your heart.

Your beautiful, sweet heart.

A single tear slips from your eye and rolls down your cheek. Javier can’t take it anymore. He wraps his strong arms around you and pulls you into him, nursing you as you sob quietly into his chest. In no time at all, you bury your head into the cloth of his shirt and let it all out.

“Lo siento mucho.” (“I’m so sorry.”) Javier whispers into your ear, cradling you in his arms.

He wants to cry too. He’s angry at himself for leaving you in the first place. He knows deep down that you hold no resentment, but he does. If he had the power to go back in time and change things; he would do it in a heartbeat. But when he places a chaste, apologetic just atop your head and smells your shampoo, his anger quickly subsides.

He’s filled with the intensity of being back with you and it’s such an overwhelming feeling of happiness.

After you regain your composure, you pull yourself away from him to take a closer look at his face. You notice a slight new scar just over the bridge of his nose and a few small wrinkles by the corners of his eyes. Somehow he looks even better than when he left. He’s still holding onto you, his fingers tracing lazy circles into the skin of your arms.

You feel practically speechless— after all these years. You’d dreamt of the moment that you reunite with Javier, and planned all the things that you wanted to tell him. Maybe you should have written it all down in a point-by-point format because right now, you couldn’t recall a damn thing.

You just couldn’t believe that he was here and standing before him. So you mustered up the only two words that could come to your mind.

“You came?”

The question held so much weight — because you were beginning to feel a certainty that you’d lost him for good. Despite Javier promising that he’d be back, all those years ago… time was wearing thin and you were both growing older.

But Javier tilted his head and gave you a knowing look.

“You called.”

Like it was the simplest thing in the world.

“I love you so much, amor,” Javier smiled and placed another kiss atop your head, and then one on your forehead too, and then a final peck on the curve of your nose. If he could stay here forever and kiss you everywhere; he would. And this time, he does. “I won’t ever leave you again. I promise.”

You barely mumble an “Okay,” before you cup your hands around his face and pull his face down to your level, pressing your mouth against his and getting lost in the touch.

Everything is so familiar— the way his lips move against yours like soft velvet, and the rich taste of honeyed whiskey intoxicating your soul, almost as much as the lingering scent of tobacco on that one leather jacket he donned back in ‘79.

He is back.

Javier is home.

————————

permanent taglist: @paintballkid711 @supernaturalgirl20 @phoenixhalliwell @stardust-galaxies @wickedfrsgrl @goth-topic @nerdypinupcrystal @kiwi-the-first @castiel-barnes @rocketqueen @honeymandos @girl-obsessed-with-things @moth-guillotine @pedro-pascal-love @hayley-the-comet @pinkninja200 @maxiarapamaya @autumnleaves1991-blog @cripplingmoon @kaqua @artsymaddie @kennedywxlsh @cheekygeek05 @mrschiltoncat @rye-flower @theamuz @persie33 @sleepylunarwolf @martellthemandalor @pedro-pastel @steeevienicks @rrtxcmt @readsalot73 @softmedics @spideysimpossiblegirl @mswarriorbabe80 @thewayofthemandalorian @greeneyedblondie44

#pedro pascal #javier peña #javi peña #javier peña x reader #pedro pascal x reader #narcos #jose pedro balmaceda pascal

[bluetomorrows]

I want longer games with beautiful graphics and how dare you suggest that I'm kidding

So that whole "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding" thing is making the rounds on Twitter again and since I don't like to give genuine opinions on that site I'm gonna talk about it here.

In short, I disagree with the sentiment. I DO want game developers to have higher pay, reasonable hours, and deadlines that aren't cruel. I want an end to the crunch that infests AAA development. But a lot of people who post things like that don't understand what it means for a game to be short or have bad graphics. Frankly, this isn't even as much me refuting this statement as it is a chance to rant about those topics.

Game length is a funny thing. When video games first transitioned to the home, the experience was essentially the same as the arcades that were so popular at the time. Atari games were mostly short score-based rounds or head-to-head multiplayer. Even games like H.E.R.O. and Adventure which deviated from that structure to do a version of the more traditional single-player progression we're used to still didn't last very long. It was a mix of both the limitations of the primitive technology and what players had come to expect from the arcades. When the NES came along expectations changed. People didn't want just arcade games, at least not the kind from the 70s. At launch Super Mario Bros. was the clear stand-out game, far surpassing its arcade-like counterparts in critical and commercial success. They wanted bigger and better experiences. So now games have to last, they have to have that progression that's standard now. This evolution was much more smooth and slow outside of North America where there was no video game crash. However, North America's explosion in video game renting also helped push forward this mindset. If you can just beat a game in the rental period before you have to return it to Blockbuster, then you're never gonna purchase it and give the game publishers the returns they really want. So how do you make a game last on still primitive hardware? NES developers came across two main options: bullshit difficulty, and replay value. The former was easier to implement. If the game was insanely hard, then naturally it would take you more time to finish it. The latter required actually talented game developers. A game should be fun to play, and ideally more fun every time. The basic idea is as you get better at the game you'll be able to have a more satisfying experience playing the levels.

Let's take the NES Castlevania trilogy as an example of these schools of level design. Castlevania 1 is a brutal game, but that's really only your first time. When you replay it you now have a grasp on your own controls, but also the patterns of the enemy. You know how to use the sub-weapons effectively and when to spend hearts on them. The visceral gameplay flow here will make you feel incredibly badass but only when you've mastered it, the first time around you'll be weak and scared. The controls are very precise and one wrong move can cost you a lot, but you'll learn the best strategies to deal with it. Castlevania 2 employs the BS difficulty on yourfirst run. The solutions to the puzzles are obtuse and NPCs will give you strange and sometimes misleading advice. You need a player's guide to get through it. But there's the ending stinger. Gaming's first alternate ending. Depending on how fast you beat the game you'll get 3 different endings. Only by mastering the game can you achieve the best ending and see Simon survive the game, therefore encouraging you to replay it to achieve the true ending you want. Castlevania 3 combines the great replayability aspects of both games. It keeps the visceral skill-based gameplay of the original while taking the idea of different content in different playthroughs from Simon's Quest. There are now multiple paths to take to Dracula's castle, and the option to recruit three other characters to your group, although only one can travel with you at any time. 2 primary routes plus 3 possible character combinations mean 6 pretty unique experiences of the game, on top of the inherent skill progression the player experiences through gameplay.

The multiple pathways of Castlevania III's map

So how long is Castlevania 3? Like 3 hours? Not really. Because you're not expected to put it down after that first playthrough. It'd be ridiculous considering how much cartridges cost. Is Castlevania 3 a short game? Yes, but really no. It's a thing I see people very often struggle to understand. Classic Sonic games for example were designed specifically around replayability, the speed-based gameplay being inspired by Yuji Naka seeing through 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. tons of times and seeing how fast he was doing it. Doing the same thing faster is a very easy way for the player to feel they're improving. So many people play these games once and dismiss them when they're not really getting the full experience. If you watch a newbie play Sonic and an experienced player play the same stages it's practically a completely different game.

However when Sonic was coming out a new type of game was starting to appear on the market. Games that didn't need to figure out ways to make themselves last longer than they could, but instead could just last.

Due to the technical limitations of the NES and its contemporaries, the first games to really challenge the ideas of length at the time were RPGs. The main gameplay was turned-based combat, something not very intensive for the system so more resources could be given to the world maps and story. The drawbacks to RPGs in this era are that many still padded gameplay with ridiculously tough enemies and high encounter rates, and the ones that really pushed things forward with grand worlds and stories often never left Japan due to the higher-than-usual cost to localize them for other markets. Still, the effects were felt. These games didn't need to be replayed to make you feel like you'd gotten a full experience. They were able to last, while still holding on to some of the replay philosophy these developers learned during the previous generation.

The massive map of Mother/Earthbound Beginnings for the Famicom/NES. The game drew praise for the fact that every NPC had unique dialogue.

This genre would really come into its own in the next generation of systems as developers across the board were given more freedom in game length due to the improved hardware. Games outside of RPGs could still take inspiration from their world design and how simple action gameplay could only be one part of the design and mechanics of a game. With the advent of the PlayStation 1 and SEGA Saturn and the insanely higher amount of space afforded by CDs, developers were no longer limited by technology and could design their games to be as long as they really wanted.

Also the N64 was there.

This laid the groundwork for the "long" games we're seeing now, something far too complex for me to really analyze. The point is game length was now something a developer had to choose, not something chosen for them. Sometimes they even give the player the choice, allowing them to beat the "main game" or do side content for 100% completion. I'd say nowadays it's strange if a game releases without any side content for you to do. Replayability was becoming less and less important to developers. The only real push back against this came with the adcent of games specifically calling back to the NES and SNES era, specifically by indie devs, a movement that has one grown in popularity as we've entered the 20s.

So here's what I'm getting at: what is game length now? What does it mean for a game to be long? How many short games are truly short? How many truly short games are good?

Well to answer that question I made a spreadsheet. I compiled a list of 50 of my favourite games and the information on them on howlongtobeat.com. I've used this site before and generally, it's accurate, the player base isn't too skilled or too bad at games. In the cases where two versions of a game were listed, I chose the one I played, unless both versions only had very minor differences, in which case I chose the one that had a larger data set. For each game I noted how long it took to beat the base game, the base game plus some of the optional content, and how long it took to get 100%, as well as what option of the three I would recommend to others. I also listed the style of replayability of each game. Whether it was based on skill improvement, alternate paths, or had little replay value. Mind you just because a game was listed as having little replay value doesn't mean you can't replay it and have fun, if the game is good then the game is good, but it just means it wasn't really designed for that.

I tried to have a varied set of games to measure, first-person and third-person, and on-rail shooters, rhythm games, RPGs, action games, and puzzle games are all included, but there may be a bias towards platformers as it's what I've played the most of.

The results were rather interesting. Keep in mind that the games chosen are all ones I consider to be quite good, so this is supposed to represent what the average good game does. I found that the average base game lasts about 9 hours, extended to 14 hours with extras, and 25 hours if you go for 100%. I recommended completing the main game + extras about 50% of the time, with the other two paths each taking up about a quarter. Overall the average time I recommended spending with each playthrough was 15 hours. The longest recommended playthrough went to Super Mario Odyssey with 62 hours as I recommended going for 100%. The shortest time was surprisingly another Mario game, that being Super Mario Land at only one hour. But I think that's actually a perfect encapsulation of what this was trying to prove, as Odyssey has little replay value, while Super Mario Land has the skill curve via repeat playthroughs that I talked about earlier. More games weren't really built for replay value than I expected, in fact I expect the number is a bit inflated as I play more retro and arcade games than the average person. But the market has shifted, content outside of the main campaign is now the lasting appeal. But the question I ask is, should it be? Now there are some games on my list like Spyro: Reignited Trilogy and Yakuza Kiwami where I feel as though if you're not going after all the side content you're kind of missing the point of the game design, however there are other games like Doom (2016); a game that has more post-game content than the base game, yet all that content is completely pointless. Sure you unlock some cute figures and a couple extra skills, but searching around for obtuse secrets just feels like the antithesis of the design of that game, which should be fast paced reaction based action. The addition of it here has always confounded me. My best guess is they were trying to replicate aspects of the original Doom, where exploration was a much bigger part of the game, but here it doesn't work. I WOULD like to play more of Doom (2016) so I can get better at the main game, not so I can find all the doodads, and a game like it should find ways to encourage replay.

I make a special note in the file of Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland and how it encourages replayability. Beating the game 100% unlocks "Extra Mode" a version of the game that is nearly identical with the one difference being that Kirby has half the health. I do dislike this approach in other games I love; Super Mario Galaxy and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze both got "Main + Extras" scores instead of "100%" scores because they pull this at the end of the game, but I don't mind it so much here. Kirby is supposed to be a breezy relaxing game, where taking damage shouldn't be that much of an issue, but this flips that on its head and legitimately changes the way the player approaches the game. But Extra Mode isn't the real thing I want to highlight, what really elevates the replayability of Nightmare in Dreamland is what you unlock after beating all of Extra Mode: Meta Knightmare. Meta Knightmare swaps out Kirby for Meta Knight, and even though he doesn't play dramatically differently from Kirby with the sword ability, he nevertheless again encourages the player to approach the same stages differently. This more serious character should cut down enemies like butter and speed through stages without breaking a sweat, and that speed aspect is even more encouraged by Meta Knightmare removing the ability to save and prominently displaying how quickly you completed the game. Things as simple as a change in aesthetic and scoring change how the game is played and give the player more unique experiences out of a game that's "only two hours long". Mind you this doesn't involve creating tons of side content and extras, it's small changes that have a massive psychological change in how the game is played.

If you want to check out the list yourself I've linked it here. Special cases where games extend playtime through other means are noted where necessary, although they aren't common.

I think the vast differences between games on this list really highlight a point I think I already knew: Games should be as long as they need to be. Typically video games are made to be played for fun, and making long games or very replayable games typically suits that goal, but ultimately gaming is an art form. War & Peace would be a worse story if it was very short, just as The Great Gatsby would be worse if it dragged itself out for another 300 pages. The idea that games SHOULD be shorter isn't something that supports game developers or players, it's something that speaks down to the idea of games as an art form.

So yeah, I don't want shorter games. I don't care if it takes me forever or if it's over in an instant. I just want the games to be good. If I want some specific length then that's my problem, not the developer's.

I think I've made my point about game length being fluid, but that's only half the statement, what about graphics?

Since the dawn of time (1992), man has sought the best and most realistic video game graphics. In olden times, neanderthals were amazed by the 3D worlds of Wolfenstein 3D and Virtua Racer, "games will never be more realistic than this" they said. Now we know that they were stupid fucking cavemen who didn't know how butt ugly their games are, they don't even look like real life. Not like Tekken, now THAT'S some real graphics.

This happened to my buddy Eric

Of course, then we realized that Tekken was also dog water graphics when the PS2 came out. And now it's 2023 and all the PS2 games look fake and gay and actually, I think Wolfenstein and Virtua Racing look pretty alright. This is a point I specifically want to address because when I see people parrot this opinion when they say they want "games with bad graphics" the examples they point to for games to aim for are titles like Hades or other more stylistic, non-realistic games, typically by indies.

This is very frustrating because those games have great graphics.

Why the hell should good graphics mean realistic graphics? Just like with pacing game graphics should be whatever the hell they need to be.

Here are some games that have good graphics in them I think

It's not about the horsepower or however gigaflops per tera butt it can render, it's just about good art direction. Good art direction can be realistic, completely stylized, or somewhere in between! To say a game like Hades has bad graphics is... how do I put this?

Basically, fuck you.

When going for realism the most common obstacle is not entering the uncanny valley, and when going for a more stylized approach the the most common obstacle is making sure everything is still clear to the player at all times.

And no, I don't want games to look bad. And that goes for both

Stylized

and realistic

Just let games be games man. If you truly believe that they're a unique art form capable of creating meaningful experiences, then let them do what they want. You can say developers should be treated better and you're right if you do, but that doesn't mean they have to make more boring art.

#video games #games #gaming #essay #kirby #castlevania

[kafus]

could you tell us the story of your shiny competitive latias in gen 3? im so curious

oh yeah so the reason i didn't go in depth about that in the post is it's actually quite a lot of obscure game mechanic talk and i didn't wanna divert from the heartwarming story to break people's brains potentially lol but yeah sure! i'll put the whole explanation below a cut because it's pretty long. warning that i'm going deep on the nerd shit sorry in advance LMAO

essentially the latias i use in gen 4 was obtained in pokemon emerald and then transferred through the pal park, i obtained it by combining ACE (arbitrary code execution) and RNG manipulation. neither of these things are hacking or require any sort of tampering with the game and can be done on original hardware (i did all this on my original emerald cart in an actual GBA SP) but it is an unintended way of playing the game, just to be upfront, not that i mind because i'm doing singleplayer stuff for fun.

so, RNG manipulation is the process of perfectly timing your button inputs and actions to get the game to spit out the "random" result that you want. because computers struggle to do true randomness (especially something as old as generation 3 pokemon games) usually "randomness" is actually based on elaborate algorithms/equations. in emerald, the game is supposed to choose a "seed" to generate random pokemon spawns etc with (think minecraft world seeds and how those generate a world, but with wild pokemon and stuff instead if you've ever played minecraft!) based on the RTC (real time clock) of the cartridge, but due to a programming error, emerald actually never seeds properly, causing it to always be stuck at a seed of 0. there have been a couple methods discovered to force the game to seed but that's irrelevant here. since the seed is always 0, every time you play emerald, all of the possible spawns are actually the same each time. to a casual player they will never notice such a thing but to an rng manipulator this becomes very, very useful.

when you get into a wild encounter (or obtain a gift pokemon, encounter a legendary, etc) the game checks what frame you're on since you booted the game, tosses that frame into its random number generating algorithm against the seed, and then every aspect of that pokemon is determined by the result, like IVs and nature and etc. so, if you were to backwards engineer this algorithm and then figure out a way to perfectly time your A press to hit the exact frame you want, you'd be able to get any IV spread etc you want... and you'd also be able to predict and time your inputs to get shinies assuming that you know your SID (secret ID, a hidden value paired with your trainer ID on your trainer card) which can be figured out through a variety of methods that i won't get into here.

as it turns out, the pokemon community is nuts and the whole backwards engineering process was already done by people way smarter than me, and software has been developed to be able to sift through all possible pokemon encounters in pokemon games, including emerald. i use PokeFinder which is by far the best program out for this right now that is getting consistently updated. software has also been developed to time your A presses, the main one i use is EonTimer which lets me pop in what frame i want to hit and it calculates the amount of time i have to wait and then beeps to tell me when to hit A. i feel the need to repeat again this software does not require you to tamper with your games in any way - i honestly highly recommend trying it sometime even if just for the novelty of getting a shiny to appear on command, it's really fun and there's tutorials on youtube by "i'm a blisy" dsfjfdskd

edit: here's a screencap of what eontimer looks like btw! not the same target frame i used back when i got this latias but yeah. it's neat

with all of that out of the way, it sounds like it should be as simple as saving in front of the latias and then looking up the spread i want, popping it into the timer, and then resetting my game, waiting for the beep, hitting A and rinse and repeat until i get it. there's a few holes in this plan though:

the spread i want (timid 31/31/31/31/31/31 AKA perfect IVs) would require me to leave my game on for literal weeks on end per attempt, which is entirely unrealistic and unfeasible. i'm doing this on actual hardware, no speedup!

the spread in question also isn't shiny with my current SID. i don't need the latias to be shiny or anything, i just want it to be for fun

i am using my emerald save file that already has the roamer Latios generated, so i no longer have the option of rng manipulating that one. this means i need to get to Southern Island and RNG the latias there... which is a mystery gift. i do not own the e-reader nor do i own an extremely expensive eon ticket to get that event in my game

and this is where ACE comes in! ACE is... complicated. if you've ever seen people pull off some excessively wild and glitchy stuff in gen 1 by swapping items around in their inventory, you were probably watching a form of ACE in action. it's the process of glitching the game into a state where you can get it to take some form of input from the player as code and then run that code, hence "arbitrary code execution". honestly ACE is not something i have studied in depth, especially with gen 3, and i mostly just followed tutorials on getting what i wanted. i can summarize this process down into a few steps:

getting the NPC trade pokemon DOTS the seedot and EV training it to a very specific spread

performing glitzer popping (wild name, i know) to corrupt DOTS the seedot into a very specific glitchy egg

changing the name of my PC boxes to what is essentially GBA assembly instructions

cloning the aforementioned glitch egg using the emerald battle tower cloning glitch a bunch of times so i can use them whenever and then hatching them, which due to the EV spread i gave DOTS, will execute the code i changed my PC box names to!

i used ACE to solve all of the aforementioned problems with this rng manipulation.

i used ACE to make my game jump thousands upon thousands of frames forward, just a little bit before the competitive spread i wanted, and then went to the battle frontier to save a battle video at the battle factory by going in and instantly losing... this is because every time a battle video is loaded, it doesn't actually save every random result that happens in the battle (like missing and damage rolls) and instead just remembers the state of the RNG before the battle started and player choices and re-calculates the same exact random chances. therefore, if i watch this battle video from the trainer card upon every reset, i will jump back to that place thousands of frames forward, right before the latias spread i want

i used ACE to change my SID to a value that would make the spread i want shiny in combination with my TID because why not

i used ACE to spawn latias on southern island and to give myself the eon ticket to get there, no real life eon ticket/e-reader required (there are ways to inject this event that don't require ACE/the real life event items but i wanted to do all this without tampering!)

as a side tangent, i should mention that i had a very obscure problem with running the ACE to get to southern island that i had to contact some gen 3 ACE experts for help on... too complicated to explain here in any sort of legible way i think, but basically the problem was every time i hatched the glitch egg, the game just froze despite my code being typed in properly in my PC boxes with no typos. the audio kept playing but it would hang on the hatching screen, resulting in this extremely cursed footage of me hatching a void egg that looked like nothing and caused my game to crash:

i just think that's neat LMAO. anyways yeah after getting all that complicated ACE shit out of the way that took me 123989123 years to set up, it was just a matter of standing in front of the rock on southern island, saving my game, getting my timer ready, soft resetting my game, watching my battle video and starting my timer, and then waiting a handful of seconds and trying to press A with the exact 1/60th of a second timing to get the latias to appear. (emerald runs on 60 fps, this always takes a few tries)

(i can't put 2 videos in a tumblr post but if you want to see the encounter happen, i took a video here, it's a direct discord file link lol)

after that i simply transferred latibreak through HGSS pal park and trained her up and started using her in the battle tower :) technically a player could randomly stumble on this latias if they left their game open long enough and had the right TID/SID, it is a completely valid encounter that can move through pokemon bank and pokemon home! i just used a variety of game knowledge and glitches to get it to appear for me without having to wait for luck. i hope any of this made sense and sorry for all the jargon!! i wasn't sure how else to tell this story tbh. if any of this sounds interesting to you i highly recommend trying out at least rng manipulation sometime! you can do a lot of cool stuff with it even without ACE being involved, i just really needed ACE for this specific pokemon i wanted SDFJFDS

#pokemon #pokemon emerald #rse #latias #long post #asks #faterunes #kiki was here #kiki plays games #rng manipulation #arbitrary code execution

[lunarsilkscreen]

Quantum Bit

Let us assume a qBit looks like a Pokè Ball; with it's front (locking mechanism) facing right towards the y-axis front. The top of the pokèball is red, and the bottom is white.

The basic description of the two states <0| |1> says that |0> is orientation as described above. State |1> is if the pokèball is upside-down facing backwards. OR a 180° rotation along the z-axis.

The basics of a quantum circuit say whichever the northern pole of this pokèball is closest to (as describe 0 being assumed to be up is up, and 1 assumed as up is down) is which value we can assume the bit represents.

This next section is where I'm asking "is this true? Or am I misunderstanding this?"

However; we seem to be able to redefine, or relabel each position on the fly. (Or at the very least; before performing transformation operations.) Which means we can have positions 0-359 (if we desire) along the z-axis. Not only that; but we can label whatever along any axis. And perform transformations of the pokèball based on quantum logic Gates.

Then--the easiest way to simplify the instruction; is to give visualizations of how the qBit rotates when interacting with various logic Gates.

My assumption is that we don't know how a qBit's orientation will look before entering a circuit; but we can force it into a default starting orientation.

Then; what we're looking at is something closer to a 3D modeling engine transformation and rotation commands. These rotations (using pseudo-code) is the easiest way to describe exactly what is happening.

Knowing the orientation and rotation of the qBit, we can then assign "states" AND force a qBit to the nearest one (if that's how we wish to do that.) based on presets we wish to perform calculations based on.

Does this mean that a qBit not only has more than ~1.58 bits of data storage; but can instead be increased to a theoretical hardware limitation that is currently undefined?

I do understand quantum entanglement will be a bit more complex, but for now; am I correct in my assumptions?

[parseolegacy]

SW:TOR NPC-OCs: The Betrayer, the Master, and the Spy

Elu'tam - The Jedi defector

Raised a Jedi and an older Padawan during the Great war, Elu'tam became dissatisfied with his position, and chose to turn to the Dark side in search of glory. Delegated by a Sith general to act under the command of Lord Varagiiri, he was sent on a mission together with her apprentice Halcor Parseo to retrieve a force sensitive child. However, he was betrayed by Halcor and left to be captured by a pair of Jedi.

After breaking out of containment 11 years later, he hunted Halcor down, finding him on a faraway planet in the outer rim, where he was raising the very same child as his own- and attacked him. Halcor quickly shuttled the child out of his reach, however, Elu'tam was under the impression that he'd managed to kill Halcor after he had disarmed him, and taken his lightsaber. Satisfied, with a lifelong trophy in hand, he went home.

Returning to the Sith, he was still considered disgraced for his imprisonment. He struggled to find his place. Forced to once again train as an acolyte, he managed to befriend a young aspiring Sith: Ekkon Kolith, who drastically rose through rank after rank with both talent and skill. Despite the boy loving him like a father, he only felt more and more envy and resentment as his achievements accumulated.

Eventually, Elu'tam caught wind of the whereabouts of the child Halcor had sent away, now a Jedi master, and went to try and kill her. He refused Ekkon's help, believing this was to be his victory, and only his- that this was his ticket out of disgrace. As he approached, he was given the chance to surrender by the Jedi master, Akk'rai Parseo, but refused, and leapt into the fight that would quickly become his last.

Varagiiri- The patron puppeteer

Halcor's Master, Ekkon's grandmother

An old Zabrak Sith Lord who was mainly active during the Great War. Since then, she's slunk into the shadows and out of the front lines. Only the wiser among the Sith remember she's still out there, somewhere, plotting. She once had a premonition that her grandson would bring about her downfall, and she has worked to avoid it ever since.

She's very picky with the apprentices that she chooses, and likes to keep the ones she's chosen as close as possible. She seeks out Sith considered 'weaker' for being amiable and kind, as she knows the value of true loyalty and honour. Training a Sith apprentice to their full strength will only mark your death, after all, unless you can rely on them being willing to repay your kindnesses- and leave you alive.

Her apprentice, Halcor Parseo, defected from the Empire. He came back to seek her help almost a decade later and she welcomed him with open arms. She helped him reintegrate under a secret identity, fully informed of his true loyalties and goals. But disloyalty towards the Empire, and even the Sith, means nothing, as long as he remains an ally to her.

DD-4 - The hidden informant

DD-4 is a very simple mini-probe droid with a very evolved personality.

Well, that first part is actually a lie. DD-4 is an incredibly advanced mini-probe droid with a simple exterior. Extremely good memory, stalwart anti-slicing firewalls and data encryption, state of the art stealth cloaking and hypersensitive recording hardware that can reach far distances, DD-4 has been modified and upgraded through the years to become one of the most effective spies this side of Dromund Kaas- under the ownership of the Sith Lord Varagiiri.

Since 1 BTC, he has instead been transferred to Halcor Parseo, to help him keep his identity secret as he lives undercover in the Empire. DD-4 has also been keeping an eye on the operations of Sith assassins at the request of his new master. And occasionally bullying him for being a boring shut-in.

He also serves as the communication tether between Halcor and Varagiiri, transmitting messages between the two when it is needed.

#swtor oc list #swtor ocs #parseolegacy #swtor npc ocs

[dojae-huh]

Different anon but thank you so much for such detailed and thoroughly written post Huh-nim! I read every words and your inside pov from a country that having war are really eye-opening. Wars are always a complicated matter with a lot of aspects to consider, I wish people who're irrationally jumping on the hate train can read this post to open their world view, sadly I don't think they want to listen to other perspective from their so call moral-highground.

I've been really upset since yesterday, I expect this is a good opportunity for antis to throw hate at him, but it's even worse that people call them self fans also refuse to acknowlegde the facts Korean fans already point out in detail about how this campaign only run in Korea, and have nothing to do with the war. They can't buy the meal if they're not in Korea, so it's not even boycotting, they just want to throw the word around thoughtlessly. Being fans I thought they would actually more interested in finding out if the informations that're harmful to him true or not but they instead keep spreading misinfo like wild fire, ignoring the fact it's a huge contact and not like he can get out of it just bc they want him to. Now some even threaten his safety at upcoming concert and fansign, how irony huh. Online attack is one thing but I really worry about his wellbeing. Hopefully SM can make sure the security will be good enough to protect him.

Yes, MD is a franchise, what the branch in one country does isn't connected to what other branch is doing. I've looked quickly into it (I wasn't aware of the thing with the company, apparently the boycott has been going on since early October). So the Israel branch (owned by some Israely businessmen, probably) donated free meals to soldiers and hospitals (hm, helping injured civilians, maybe even those attacked by terrorists in the border villages (?) is a bad deed indeed, as for the soldiers, from their POV they are fighting to rescue hostages, and in Isralian's eyes they are their protectors). Soon after, many branches in other countries (mostly majority muslim) donated to Palestine. And Korean campaign is about helping Korean children (another bad deed).

The behaviour of these fans simply speaks for their immaturity and lack of proper education (even Cambridge and Oxford fail people nowadays, I hear). Idols are low on the totem pole, they are entertainment, not human beings with feelings even. They and their image can be smeared with mud at any perceived "danger" to a fan's "higher morality". Just remember Jaehyun and his covid and bar scandal.

I doubt those who threated Do's wellbeing are his fans. Most ptobably they are the solo-stans of other members, and they just attack him "protected by the righteousness", knowing other fans will be hesitant to fight them off, that they have the stage to themselves. It's no different from Putin preaching "we fight to protect our (religious) values and (slavic) traditions". Even a dictator uses excuses before the masses, painting himself the good one.

People, who are quick to jumping on hate vagons shouldn't read me, I fear, I'm a Russian afterall. A common age nazi. So my wise words won't rich them.

I heard a comparison recently of the world with a gladiator arena. I liked it. It gives no excuse for self-pitying or for naivette. If you want to live, you must learn how to think for yourself and how to navigate the bloodbath happenning around you.

People are weird monkeys. We are non-agressive to our kin, which allows us to cooperate, share food, shelter, etc, but highly agressive to the others, the rival tribes who potentially can take our food and other resources. We progressed technologically, but not biologically. We are still primitive animals with a grenade in hand. Civility, refinement, culturedness are all just a thin layer of late addition software atop of older software and hardware. We are stripped of them in a blink of an eye unless we learn true morals and acquire integrity.

When an idol is labeled as good, he is "ours", "belonging to my tribe of good people". Once someone says that the idol is bad, he is ousted from "friends" to "enemies" category right away. And the rules of attitude change in an instant. You can't like him anymore, you can't protect him anymore, he is "our enemy", and if you think otherwise "you are like him, you are the enemy as well". A mob is formed and starts to live by the herd rules.

Researchers from Hebrew University, NYU, and MIT explored herd mentality in online spaces, specifically in the context of "digitized, aggregated opinions."[7] Online comments were given an initial positive or negative vote (up or down) on an undisclosed website over five months.[8] The control group comments were left alone.

The researchers found that "the first person reading the comment was 32% more likely to upvote it if it had been already given a fake positive score."[8] Over the five months, comments artificially rated positively showed a 25% higher average score than the control group, with the initial negative vote ending up with no statistical significance in comparison to the control group.[7] The researchers found that "prior ratings created significant bias in individual rating behavior, and positive and negative social influences created asymmetric herding effects."[7]

"That is a significant change," Dr. Aral, one of the researchers involved in the experiment, stated. "We saw how these very small signals of social influence snowballed into behaviors like herding."[8]

Doyoung wanted to help the children of his country but in return for his kindness gets bashed by virtue-signalling people.

What can you do? Grow your own head, have a proper moral compass, gather as much information as possible before taking a stance or making decisions, and understand that people be people - easily manipulated and swayed emotional and aggressive beings.

#ask me away #food all around chips all around

[thesyncretismofpolysemy]

"Arrested personal growth serves industrial "growth". By suppressing the nature dimension of human development (through educational systems, social values, advertising, nature-eclipsing vocations and pastimes, city and suburb design, denatured medical and psychological practices, and other means), industrial growth society engenders an immature citizenry unable to imagine a life beyond consumerism and soul-suppressing jobs."

"Soul has been demoted to a new-age spiritual fantasy or a missionary's booty, and nature has been treated , at best, as a postcard or a vacation backdrop or, more commonly, as a hardware store or refuse heap. Too many of us lack intimacy with the natural world and with our souls, and consequently we are doing untold damage to both."

"In common parlance, “fool” and “sage” appear to be opposites, one connoting ignorance and the other wisdom. At their depths, however, both exhibit a non-attachment to form or outcome. The Sacred Fool acts from what often seems to be innocence, insanity, or lampoonery but is no less wise for it. We think of a Sage, in contrast, as strictly sober; but because she doesn’t strive and doesn’t seek positions of elected or hired leadership, the true Sage has neither investment in sobriety nor compulsion to comply with rules. The Sacred Fool dimension of our own psyches merges the innocence of the child and the wisdom of the elder. Both draw on the capacity to perceive simply and purely, to be fully present to the moment and to all things existing and happening within it. The Sacred Fool — in others or in ourselves — helps us grasp the big picture by poking fun at himself (and, in so doing, at all of us) or by making fun of us directly. He also might respond to our solemn questions and conceptions with perspectives that reject or reframe our most cherished assumptions."

Bill Plotkin