I think it was the illness. Even without the illness based on the first games ending and the fact that Arthur was not mentioned or existed within it I was pretty sure I knew how rdr2 was going to end before I started but the illness gave it such a somber tone. Arthur recognized his mortality and really started to reflect.

It’s been ages since I played rdr1 but as far as I remember John was more “I’m doing this to be done, for my family!”. The tone was much lighter as a result even though there were moments that were heavy. And the characters weren’t as developed so I didn’t care as much. Dutch was just a fucking monster in that game, bill and Javier were just props. But rdr2 fleshed them all out so much

Of course, you are free to feel whatever you want. How could I possibly stop such a thing. What I mean is if you decide that I need to adhere to dress code based on it you can go fuck yourself.

I mean it is an era where up and moving 100 miles basically meant you started your life over. But that was kind of the plot: they were a gang of that era where they could run in a town, wreak havoc, disappear, and the infrastructure didn’t yet exist to reliably track them across the gigantic land mass that is North america.

But by the time the game rolls around the beginnings of the modern federal government are happening and agencies to track people like them across the country are in full swing. So all of a sudden their way of life is coming to a close, quickly. Instead of just some pissing off a sheriff in a town and never being able to go back there, occasionally having a bounty hunter after you, you now have a huge team of people with the resources of a government coming for you.

I think part of it that’s understated is the size of the map. The map is obviously big for a game but it’s supposed to be a huge chunk of America. When you compare the geography of the map to America it’s somewhat clear that it’s supposed to be a gigantic swath of America, from like Montana down to Louisiana and across to Texas. You can ride across the map in 20 min but obviously this would take months irl. Obviously this is about gameplay balance but as a result you lose the sense that Arthur is going extremely far away when he’s going from valentine to st denis, when in reality that would be like a month of riding and crossing several states. Even if he did a genocide that would probably shake the heat for a little while back then

They did obviously play it up of course. If you literally murdered everyone in a town back then there would probably be more of a response from the surrounding towns to find you. But gamers like violence and it’s again about balancing gameplay vs authenticity. usually gameplay wins because otherwise you end up with a boring game

I remember so many people being furious at rockstar for not releasing dlc on the scope of gta4 but honestly with this game I don’t know what form that narrative would take that could be satisfying.

The main narrative is concluded decisively obviously. It’s a prequel so continuing with John would just be rdr1. Another undead nightmare is eh, zombies are so played out. I guess you could fill in what went on with Dutch or some of the others that show up in rdr1 but frankly I don’t really want to play as them. I suppose you could intro some new character that’s part of their new gang. I dunno. I get why they didn’t prioritize it (well that and more so that dlc costs a ton to develop for a pitiful return relative to something like gta online, which is kind of sad)

I’m unfamiliar but some brief searching shows they use kigen for sim handling and mediatek for processor/modem so it appears they also have little to no American parts, though I’m not sure of this

The idea of appropriate clothing outside of like shirts with swastikas or pictures of murdered babies on them is bullshit. Your delicate sensibilities shouldn’t dictate my sense of self expression

This is not surprising at all, this is exactly what he did in the aftermath of Samoa. Instead of taking any accountability or reflecting on his actions for murdering 80+ children he blamed the populace for being malnourished and accepting vaccines (that’s why they died, of course) and then peddled this exact rhetoric word for word

This is a very good option

If you want a phone that can run a degoogled rom without voiding warranty and don’t mind some American parts Fairphone

If you don’t care about warranty or some American parts you have a lot of choices. Samsung is Korean, Sony Xperia is Japanese, etc

If you want a phone that has absolutely no American parts (which means avoiding the Qualcomm chips in the above phones) you are limited to Chinese phones and really to Huawei. Xiaomi still uses some Qualcomm chips. This will make using western apps a bit of a chore though as they will have to be sideloaded, they won’t be available through the huawei appgallery and the kirin chips don’t support 5g. These are degoogled though. I don’t think you’re in the us based on your post but just in case you are these won’t work in the USA, carriers may not activate them bc sanctions

Qualcomm is hard to get around for cellular modems but their stranglehold is finally starting to get broken. Mediatek (Taiwan), Samsung (Korea), Huawei (China), etc are making cellular modem ics now. Even within America apple finally released theirs with the newest iphone that just released the other day

I phrased it poorly by saying I genuinely don’t think he cares about that. I agree with you. what I mean is I don’t think that’s his primary goal. I think it’s a nice bonus that he also gets to absolve a fellow racist

I’ll have you know I shower occasionally

this made my cat freak the fuck out

What if I have a car covered in weeb shit. I don’t, but what if I did

Depends on budget and storage options

That’s not much data

Listed in order:

Encrypted nas. For that small amount of data raid 1. A shitty e waste pc would suffice. A ups would be ideal. This is least ideal honestly as it requires power, a maintainer, and isnt truly backup

SSD of some kind, even a usb stick Enterprise hard drive like wd gold or ironwolf pro Redundant copies, 2-3 ideally, store in various cool dry locations

LTO tape - far more resilient than hard drives and cost effective per tb but downside is that you need a very expensive ($3-5000) tape drive to utilize them, also very slow to read/write, older/cheaper tape formats (I believe pre lto8?) don’t have the ability to act as an external disk where you can just drag and drop files and are more of a pain to use

Blu-ray M-DISK. Upside for these are that they are very resilient, can be stored basically anywhere assuming you put them in a sealed container, and will last many many years (probably longer than you’ll be alive). Downside is that storage per disk is very low (100gb), cost per disk is high, and write speed is low. so you will need ~ 50 for 5tb of data, each disk is about $25 (so $1225 though tbf there’s probably bulk pricing) and it would take 37.5 hours to burn them. But this would be the most resilient of all

Cloud storage - backblaze, tresorit, icedrive, etc

Hybrid solution - ideal scenario. Load a hard drive or two and lock them away somewhere. If you have access to a Blu-ray burner maybe burn a handful of m-disks of your most critical data (not all 5tb but the most important 1-200gb or so). If you can access a tape drive do that too. Ideally update the tape and hard drives monthly. Update the Blu-ray as needed. local nas and cloud for daily backups

Obviously encrypt your files. Veracrypt is a good solution in a political dissident situation - can create hidden volumes so that if you are caught you can give up passwords and reveal only the outer volume, keeping the inner volume hidden

I love this game. It has several drawbacks, some of the physics make things feel like you’re underwater the whole time, the wanted system can be extremely irritating at the worst moments, and for a game with a world that is extremely alive the missions are extremely on rails where often even doing something slightly off the developers intended path will fail you

But despite that I still love it. The game is gorgeous years later. They put so much effort into the world. It’s not just the graphics, it’s every detail that just makes it feel so alive. Walking around the town the npcs are so thought out, have so much dialogue. The animals too. I remember playing other open world games after and just noticing more so how lifeless they felt in comparison; that npcs would repeat dialogue after 2 or 3 lines, animals would run in circles, etc. and the story is great.

I hope that once gta6 is done they turn to rdr3. Its overall a much better series with a stronger narrative, better characters, etc. with red dead they seem to not be as overly concerned with shitting it up with online bullshit and microtransactions though so the series might be done for

I genuinely dont think he cares about that. Well, maybe he does, but that’s ancillary. I think he wants the civil unrest. It’s an amazing smoke shield so that he can get away with all sort of nonsense. If the news cycle is clogged with articles about this and retaliatory protests that’s less eyes on him gutting systems and enriching himself

Ha no, it means Japanese (or Japanese language). The kanji would be pronounced “nihongo”

And further he remained unrepentant for his role in murdering 83 Samoan children (most of which were babies). Instead deflecting blame onto the people of Samoa, saying it was because they were malnourished, or possibly because they had the audacity to get vaccinated during an epidemic that he had a direct role in causing (and thus the vaccines killed the unvaccinated children who died of measles, somehow)

My basic math skills have been terrible lately. I made a basic math error in a post the other day too. I was a strong student in math too

Is this cognitive decline? I’m not even 40

Tech was ruined in the 90s when capitalistic influences (microsoft being the dominant force but far from the only one) propagandized the industry and eventually populace at large with the idea that competition in the industry is what drives innovation.

Granted, much of their work was already done for them thanks to western influence perpetuating this ideal for ages. But when the frameworks for open standards, interoperability, and collaborative development were being proposed and put into place they were shot down and/or actively sabotaged

As a result 40 years later we have this mess. A landscape filled with nightmare tech. Fragmentation everywhere, design heavily influenced by a small handful of sociopaths with no empathy and active disdain for users, the idea of open standards is something that requires government intervention (and still rarely occurs), interoperability is something that has to be hacked around and frequently breaks as a means to encourage purchasing a competing product.

What could have been. Tech designed for people’s needs rather than tech designed to extract income