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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)LA
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2 yr. ago

  • Oh, I guess my comment looked like I was mad at the console companies? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sound angry. I just don't like using consoles because sometimes it feels like there is a forced obsolescence placed on them like just about everything these days. I feel like investing in a console is submitting myself to the whims of the console maker, who will decide for me when it's out of date and how I'll be able to use the games for it in the future. You know, I have an iPad 2 that works just like it did when it was brand new but it's not useful for very much because software updates on it were stopped a few years ago. Now it's a digital picture frame. If the iPad was a person, I think it would shout at me and say, "I still work great! If somebody would just let me, I'd show you web sites! Why are you just using me as a silly digital picture frame? I'm way better than this, you fool!" I think if people like using consoles they should feel free to use them. I don't like them for me because I like to have all my games in one place and usable in the future. I see a PC as a better use of my money (again, for me, not for everyone) and I'm glad I made the decision to stop buying consoles years ago. If I had kids, they would learn how to game on a PC or not play games at all, I guess! Anyway, I was mostly talking about money, but there are other good reasons to use a PC over a console. For example, you can upgrade a PC with newer hardware as needed, so that's less wasteful, don't you think? Anyway, no anger from me. Console companies will do what they see fit to make money. That's how the economy works and that's just the way it is. That being said, I refuse to participate in that system and I think if somebody reads this and decides not to, well I did something useful and helpful today.

  • That's the trade off. If you think you have to have the latest, greatest, fastest hardware you are going to have to shell out the big bucks. More often than not, a game looks the same to me whether its played on this year's graphics card or last year's graphics card or even the year before last's graphics card. At some point speed and memory size are numbers that don't need to go beyond a certain point to give you decent software performance. People will disagree with this and I think that's fine. Maybe my eyes are wonky. Who knows? My wonky eyes save me money. The graphics look about the same to me using this or that graphics card.

  • Yes. It's a money grab more than anything else, designed to make people buy new stuff. In this case, a new console, new games, new peripherals, subscriptions, etc. I like my PC because of the freedom from this type of stuff it affords me, it is in fact cheaper to use a PC if you're a careful shopper. If you're the type of shopper that buys things as soon as they come out or you're impulsive, well then, yes, PC gaming can get very expensive. But it's like anything else in this capitalist world of consumption. Jeans can be affordable or outrageously expensive. So can hamburgers. I'm the type of shopper that never pays full price for ANYTHING and I never buy things on a whim. I study stuff, think about it, and wait. I do my own upgrades on hardware, too. Opening a PC tower and sticking things into slots is not exactly complicated.

  • I don't know about that. You can't really say what the future holds unless you have a magical crystal ball or something. I take that type of answer as legitimately confused on the part of the respondent. I didn't exactly say it was a good thing, just that there is hope. They could eventually wind up one way or the other. Time will only tell. I like to be optimistic and hopeful. It keeps me alive.

  • Except when the console maker decides to make a new console and decides what games will no longer work on the new console and what will. Or, perhaps the console maker decides that you can play some of your old games on the new console, but decides that to do so you have to buy a subscription, or you have to buy the games again because they had to make a new version of the old games that work with the new console. A PC will outlast that. You can buy two or three consoles, or buy one PC. Doesn't look cheaper to me. Then, I'll add to my comment: When it's finally time to buy a new PC, which for whatever reason you have decided on your own because nobody cancelled your PC, you take your whole collection of games to the new PC and they work just fine on the new PC, plus you can have the new games that your new PC can run.

  • This is very sad. I was in high school in the 1990s and I was hugely big mouthed left-wing boy with friends who were hugely big mouthed left-wing boys and girls. This in a small town. My graduating class was 100 or so. "most high school seniors claim no political identity" looks promising. They are looking at the landscape and saying "this makes no sense, I'm not signing up for any of this crap." So, you know, perhaps a silver lining?

  • Yeah, notice how I used "might" in my comment. That's a modal verb of "maybe maybe not." PC Gaming is just as easy to use as a console. PC Gaming, however, looks expensive. It isn't, if you math geek yourself out and realize that instead of buying consoles multiple times, you can pretty much stick with the same PC in the same time period. With my gaming PC, all my stuff connects to it by Bluetooth. It's ready to go when I switch it on. I can play most of the games on it that are available on whatever console, except the few that are exclusives tied to a particular console. Even better, I can play games to my heart's content. I have a library to choke a horse and it will be viable probably until I'm dead. The problem is when we talk about money. To have a nice gaming PC or gaming laptop, you have to shell out double what a console costs. What a lot of people can't think about is: You shell out more on the gaming PC, but it is viable longer because it is not subject to the whims of console makers. Sure, you can just shell out 400 bucks or whatever on a Nintendo Switch instead of shelling out 1000 or so on a gaming PC or laptop (some of them are 2000 or more). However, the computer, if you know how to take good care of it, is viable twice or three times as long as the console, so in the end, you've made a good investment and you don't have to worry about changing consoles when the company that makes the console decides to produce a new product. This is what I was talking about. People don't understand it perhaps because they don't think about it, but they really should because it's a money saver in the end. Plus: You can play your old games just fine for as long as you want.

  • Yes, this is classic anthropological theorizing, in fact. Claude Levi-Strauss touched upon these issues, and they continue to be interesting questions to think about. He didn't frame it in the medical field, but it's the same question that plagues sociological and anthropological research. Your elaboration actually highlights something very important: the straight-up medical field could learn from medical anthropology and seems to pay little attention to it. The two fields have so much to talk about together and collaborate. It happens sometimes, but not often enough.

  • The article kind of lost me on the taxation methods. I agree that private property and its whole conceptualization in a capitalist world is problematic. Simply making people pay tribute to the state as a solution is unoriginal. I am so shocked that nobody has come up other ways to deal with it. Like, say people can't own more than X number of properties at one time? Why is taxation always the solution? It doesn't solve the problem, really. Theoretically, if you can afford to pay the taxes on the properties, you can own all the properties. It might be difficult to do, but somebody would find a way.

  • This is important. I also question the idea that copyright law might be "broken." It might need an update, as most laws do, simply because it's behind the times. The whole conception of this video is to spread doubt, from its sensationalist headline to the content, from which you have extracted the key points of it that wish to spread doubt. Legal systems worldwide need to catch up and develop as fast as technology and software develops now. That's the problem. Nothing broken here. Outdated? Perhaps.

  • I remember how much I loved using Solaris in the 1990s in the computer lab at college. People still use Solaris? I never saw something as elegant and intuitive as Solaris in those old days.

  • Thank you. I lost her quite a while ago because my older sister cut off my ability to communicate with my mother quite a while ago. I live on another continent so I couldn't really do much about that to fight it. In a lot of ways, I mourned the loss of my mother a long time ago, so her actual physical death is something that I already mourned. Still, it really sucks, but my mom was unwell for quite a while, and she is no longer unwell. That's a good thing. Thanks for being so nice with your comment. I'll be just fine. Situations like this in my personal life remind me about all the things I need to do to protect people from these kinds of unpleasant situations that are unfair.

  • I think you've hit upon what medical anthropology needs to sort out as a discipline. To be specific: What constitutes a moral position versus a phenomenological observation about a cultural phenomenon that assigns meaning to biology and anatomy? It is quite an interesting problem you have highlighted. This does not, in my opinion, question medical anthropology as a valid scientific field of study. It's something to think about, research, and talk about to improve the field, which is a fascinating field, indeed, and totally worthwhile.

  • This is why the last Nintendo I used was a Nintendo GameCube. The last Playstation I used was a PS2. I just started to game on a PC. Console gaming might become a thing of the past if people get tired of this type of thing. You can hook a laptop or PC up to a TV now if you want.

  • Oh, man, This is so hard. I feel for you. She could be testing you. She's waiting for you to say something back. This type of testing could be good or bad. She could be testing you to see if you have the courage to complain about what she's doing. She could be testing you to see if you get impatient and explode so she has a reason to complain about you. She might like you, she might not like you. You are mature in your attitude because you don't feel like you need to be friends with or like the people you work with to work with them in a productive way. Maybe she is totally immature and just has it out for you because she doesn't like your hair or whatever random reason. Her behavior is most definitely immature, because this is what children do with teachers. I'm a teacher, this is what some children do with new teachers. They press the buttons, push the envelope, read and interpret the rules and try to test them out. I have had so many co-workers like this. Six months is a long time to be working with her and never have a dead moment in the work day when she actually tries to engage you in casual conversation, so it might happen soon. With co-workers like this, when there is a dead moment in the shift and for whatever reason this type of person wants to make casual conversation, I just make like they aren't talking to me, like I never even heard them. It really makes them angry to the point of almost hostility. After that, these types of petty nonsense interactions while working disappear for me because they realize they are not getting anywhere and have no power over me. This is what, in the end, she is testing. Her power. At some point, she will realize that she has none, just like you. I really hope there is a dead moment when she tries to make casual conversation, because it really is pivotal for people like her when you ignore them. I've even done the lovely thing of saying, when they get in my face because I'm ignoring them, "sorry, not here for chit-chat. if it's work-related I might be all ears for you, not that it really matters, you're the same as me." After that, I have been left alone to do my job and, sometimes, I've even made a friend, actually. The first person I did this to like 20 years ago is actually a good friend of mine now, so many years later, when we have our careers yadda yadda and don't work together anymore.

  • I actually found your point of view a good way to think about this.. To me, it suggests that masculinity needs to be redefined or the dichotomy "masculine versus feminine" needs to be forgotten about. In different cultures that have a dichotomy of masculine versus feminine, the definitions or, if you will, characteristics that define them are different, often radically so. Why can't it be manly to play with flower arrangements and hand out flowers to children? Sounds perfectly fine to me. Humans give meaning to body parts and behaviors with language. Depending on the society they live in, those meanings vary and evolve over time. Fashion trends in the Western world is possibly a way to understand this. Historically, the clothes that men and women wear that is "fashionable" changes over time. Sometimes prints are OK for men, sometimes they aren't. Maybe everything needs to be considered OK for everybody.