Well, the Mosin, being a bolt-action, was a bit of a meme funny inclusion…

…but technically the Garand, and any AK/SKS kinda rifle, are (or can be) semi-automatic wherein a pull of a trigger discharges a single round. And yes, Hi-Point also makes rifle models Lol.

Companies like Kel-Tec also market to the civilian affordability crowd.

I dunno, was I missing the point of this emphasis maybe? Let me know if something went over my head. :)

“What do you know about owls?”

“Lots of stuff!”

“ORLY?”

“YARLY.”

There’s also the cost.

Hi-Point: The hole-puncher for the common folk.

Or auction house AK variants. Or strike old school fear into fascism with a Mosin Nagant or an M1 Garand (ping!).

Lol memes aside (and not judging!) there’s hardware to fill the need at all price points. It’s the ammo that’s hard to keep up with! Also, safety (and skill) training could be a lot more universally accessible and applied.

The time to gain familiarity and proficiency is also a severely limiting factor, and of course the working class have less and less of it.

I think our general attitude and understanding about firearms (in the U.S/“West”) has been intentionally poisoned into some bizarre right-wing fetish thing specifically to make sure level-headed, educated, reasonable people who weren’t ultra-capitalists wouldn’t be the group statistically holding a stupidly unholy amount of them.

I guess my point is: Capitalism will sell you whatever you like. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a vetting process for its preferred audience. It simply adjusts the culture to make the very idea revolting to those it would prefer not selling to, and amplifying the signal to stupidly comical degrees to its target audience.

Honestly shocked I’m the first to leave this here lmao

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLnWf1sQkjY

(Uhhh maybe don’t have volume full blast at work or something lol)

It goes quite nice paired with a fancy dress(age)!

I remember people discussing hardware and one of the best advice comments I’ve ever seen was:

“Turn off that little FPS counter and just enjoy the damn game.”

People get so wrapped up in the hardware hobby they forget why they care in the first place, which would be fine if it wasn’t just fuelled by hardware marketing to make everyone else feel like they’re “missing out.”

I’ve yet to actually play it, shame on me, but A Blind Legend took an interesting approach to being graphicsless!

Those were pretty cool. My dad had a single one in a hard plastic case, I want to say it was like 100 MB or something? I loved how chunky and solid it was.

I do feel like it’d be cool to have a storage medium that at least feels like that again. Like sliding a big hot-swappable SATA SSD into a slot and getting a satisfying “kaCHUNK” and a little busy light.

For one, I’m just happy to see a hardware stat that isn’t rapidly and constantly enlarging for no other reason than being incrementally released to pressure constant sales.

I mean it’s a small thing, but neat! I did wonder why cache sizes tended to stay small even between generations.

Something I was able to do with my old OnePlus 3 phone, was use it as a Linux USB. It was a pretty neat trick!

It was really convenient to just snag a work laptop and boot it into Puppy Linux (which lives entirely in RAM) to browse around and such without my job looking too closely and being creepy about it.

I’d argue art is a communication medium. You can communicate minimally, or you can communicate with vast detail, both require skill.

Art museums are full of work that says nothing, but passed a few gatekeepers with clout keys or shock value.

Skilled rendering with nothing to say is as unimpressive as deep ideas communicated by random spatter. The viewer isn’t getting anything from it, no matter how trendy their turtleneck is.

I take a bit of issue with this idea that “the amount of skill involved doesn’t matter”, because that’s the exact logic used to say artists shouldn’t be able to afford a living, or could be replaced by algorithms.

(And yet we easily spot and mock visually exciting Ai renderings for how soulless and empty they are.)

Yes, we’ve seen impressive high-skill ultra-real pencil renderings that, in the end could sadly be replaced by a photograph, because there was no interpretation involved.

And we’ve seen awards presented for sticking bananas on walls as a “critique of modern society.”

Art is a skill. It’s a hard skill, because it’s not a solitary pursuit solely anchored in visual perfection. If nobody can understand or appreciate your point, it falls apart.

“This is how the world ends: Not with a bang, but with frivelously cast ironic votes because lols.”

EDIT: argh, I know I didn’t crop it. I gotta put all these on my computer so I can bulk-snip that exact number of pixels from each image lol…

And cheers to you for mentioning that 2018 Substance is still useful!

…Yikes, I hope I kept that license key somewhere, I’m sure I did…

If only to learn it because it seems to be a hard requirement with so many artist positions. =\

(Although…if we really blew them away with Blender tools and they couldn’t tell the difference, would they really care? Hm…)

See Also: My digital games collection

It seems the Ukraine conflict and the U.S’s plans to counter China’s push on Taiwan indicate that the future of warfare is:

…Just…a gazillion, never-ending swarms of coordinated, “cheap”, militarized drones…

doesn’t make any sense.

My theory?

The real conspiracy: It always goes back to the desires of capital.

Why is it always that climate change is a huge con job and it’s all a secret control plan that we…need to stop burning and breathing known carcinogens?

Oh, because the evil shadow government orgs like the EPA and OSHA want to take all our good ol’ jobs (tey derk er jurbz!) with their “regulations” and “standards” and “penalties for pollution” right?

And they’re trying to make America “less great” by no longer being a mass-polluting post-war economic powerhouse! Think of the lost profits! Think of the widespread misery and poverty wrought by a secret New World Order of…(Paper flip) corporate regulation! What’s next? Unions?!

Yes, chem trails are ultimately a path to such horrors as a less wealthy C-suite and not putting clean air on the commodities exchange market. (gasp)

…And all these conspiracies are seeded and peddled by the very sources that told people to take veterinary dewormers or inject sanitizer to cure a virus, have brought us the highest unemployment rates seen in a century, dismantled and fired safety regulation and watchdog agencies (deh DERK-A-DURRBS!), are trying to bring back child labor and company towns, and conveniently rail against taxation which they dodge anyway.

EDIT: Sorry for the essay LOL.

I really appreciate your take and efforts to be compassionate about the loads of people who simply were let down by a lack of, or sometimes learned cultural opposition to, education. We’re paying for it so hard right now.

I mean, yeah, MK-Ultra was a very real program, for instance. The Cold War Era was loaded with shadowy nonsense conducted by spooks, all over the place! Real conspiracies totally happened!

But people on the whole crave sensation and don’t have the logic or education to discern between whistleblowers and grifters.

I think the part that is so painful is that there’s just so much noise.

It feels like conspiracy theories generally used to be…More harmless? More often the stuff of kooky neighbors and not always dangerously deluded basement militants and chart-topping podcasts.

Now it’s a carefully engineered, algorithmically driven pipeline from the former to the latter.

Now, thanks to social media, they’re politically weaponized psy-ops: Get the masses all riled up about aliens, mind-control vaccines, and satanic child-farming underground pizza delivery chain networks…

…And they won’t bother to focus their energy any real and “boring” conspiracies, like monopoly-forming, price fixing, shrinkflation, planned obsolescence, cop unions, the insurance industry, manufacturing consent, stock market manipulation, wage theft, billionaire bunkers, car-required civic planning, surveillance normalization, gerrymandering, Cambridge Analytica, McKinsey, class warfare, too-much-to-list about Boeing…

Because those are very real problems perpetuated by very bad powerful people, and they take a ton of very risky work to fix.

And those conspiracies are so very boring and predictable, because it’s a massive shell game with a million little nodes that all lead to countless instances of “Someone is doing these bad things to amass more money or influence.”

Last note: It’s also really odd and telling how the ones who are SO adamant about government conspiracies don’t tend to care much about corporations.

Government mind control chips in water (to make us more… subservient or something?) Totes!

But ad companies listening to your devices to figure out when you’re at your weakest to push ads for foolish purchases?

Naaaaah!

And sometimes like this!

I learned this word from Roller Coaster Tycoon as a kid lol.