The mainline SMT games all take place in post-apocalyptic Japan
Almost all, except for the oddball that is Strange Journey, taking place in post-apocalyptic Antarctica, instead. It has a lot of elements that differ from other Mainline entries, but Atlus treated it as such and acknowledged it with the recent Mainline 25th anniversary celebrations. I really enjoyed it and think it's worth a playthrough, but it may not be the best starting point. I also don't know how the remake holds up, I've read complaints about changes online, but SMT fans can be a bit touchy about their favorite games.
SMT 4 is… odd. It starts out looking like a much more generic fantasy setting, but it most assuredly is not. It’s good, but it also very clearly is straining against the limits of the system it’s on. SMT 4 Apocalypse is also extremely good, and I would suggest playing SMT 4 just to play SMT 4 Apocalypse. I won’t say too much about SMT 5 except to note that it’s also good and I recommend it strongly.
I'll disagree on this one and just add that not everyone who enjoyed 4 found Apocalypse to be that good. From what I saw, people that really just love the battle system and doing things like building out the perfect team for tackling boss rushes and insanely challenging super bosses really enjoyed it. If you go in expecting more of SMT IV's world and story, you may well be disappointed by it. I found the characters to be unlikeable, personally, and it seemed like an unnecessary rehashing of the story. I also recall some unavoidable boss rushes in the main story that made certain areas really grindy and killed my enjoyment for a good while.
Otherwise, I would say a pretty decent write up here.
There's a reason these schemes are being run in developing countries, and it's not because Putin wants to diversify the Russian workforce. I could see it being an appealing offer for someone looking to get out of Nepal or most African nations, especially for someone who hasn't had luck with getting visas to go elsewhere or that hasn't been able to get a position that didn't involve leaving their family behind. It's not as though they'll be doing this recruiting in all parts of these countries, either, just as I'm sure they're only showing them the nicest parts of Russia to make it look more developed than et really is in many places.
The work bathroom is currently a warzone, on their phone speakers people like to play music, play games at full blast, and one guy likes to chill to ambient rainforest. What song can I play to passive aggressively make it known that I don't want to listen to their tik tok feeds while I work out my demons?
People are wild these days. My wife and sister have both, working in different industries and companies, come home and informed me they were freaked out and a bit repulsed to discover coworkers in the bathroom, audibly having a bowel movement of some sort, with an iPhone on the floor of the stall facetiming their partners. These were both work places that skewed younger, but people have just been going feral. My last job, I walked into the bathroom and heard what I assumed was the Smack, smack, smack of somebody jerking off, only to find out it was a guy near his 60s doing clap push-ups in front of the urinals.
The exam software my uni uses for instance only runs on Windows & MacOS.
I would say this segment of @Iceblade02's post would be the issue, in that people are locked into these systems even if they prefer to use open source software. For example, my university based in the UK requires I submit my assignments in an MS Word format that supports Microsoft's annotations for the tutor to do all marking up and correcting/commenting on the paper there. There are ways to do the same thing with PDFs, but at least on my modules so far, it hasn't been an option at all. That's just for papers and such.
When it comes to exams where you're supposed to be answering the questions and submitting them as you go, there are schools that insist on you installing monitoring software so they can make sure you aren't cheating, which only tends to be available for Windows and Mac. I don't know how common that sort of software is outside the US, but it's certainly a thing.
Pretty sure you need to file them so long as you remain a citizen in any circumstances you would need to file them while in the US, you just don't have to pay US taxes on income you've already paid taxes on in your country of residence, up to something like $100,000/year for a single individual.
I don't know if they resolved it, but I also recall it became more of a pain to open a foreign bank account as a US citizen, because they US government was trying to impose reporting requirements on any bank that had accounts held by US citizens, regardless of where they were.
I think you just underestimate how awful public transport is in the US. Beating what's available here is not a high bar to clear, especially when it's nonexistent in many places. It can also vary pretty widely across and within regions. I imagine public transport in London is a different beast from public transport in Manchester, for example.
When I was visiting Manchester in March, it was pretty great. I could get around the city via bus, tram or walking pretty easily, and trains between Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds were all pretty clean, even late at night, and the most I paid for two round-trip tickets was £48.40 going to Leeds and back. Everything else was below £30 for two people, round trip.i Wherever I got off, I could get an Uber to where I was going for less than £10 if I didn't feel like waiting for a bus, or there wasn't a bus nearby. For a similar trip here, for one person going from NYC to Philadelphia and back would run me in excess of £100 with Amtrak making the trip in about 90 minutes, or closer to £30 round trip, but with each leg taking nearly 3 hours without any delays on NJ Transit. A 15 minute Uber here to work would routinely run me close to £20 each way, before accounting for a tip.
Nobody was screaming in my face asking for "donations," there weren't people with amplifiers blasting music, or homeless folks left to stew in their own filth keeping entire cars unusable for anyone else due to the stench. Even walking about the cities at all hours of the night, I had a grand total of 3 people ask me for money in a week. Residents apologized a few times about how awful things were there, but it was absolutely lovely, even in the parts they thought were local embarrassments for allegedly being unbearably dirty or run down. Granted, it was nice and cool, so I didn't get to see if Manchester gets the same lovely summer effect that NYC does, where every outdoor space smells like hot piss and garbage once the temperature clears about 27°C.
Granted, spending a week in a city as tourists isn't the same as living there, but from folks I know who've made the move, it was a massive upgrade in terms of things like public transit and general quality of life compared to life in the US or Canada. I ran the numbers, and it would actually make sense for me to take over a 50% pay cut if I could move there. Heck, it was cheaper for us to eat out for every meal for a week straight for two people and me buying several coffees out a day than it is for me to shop and prepare every meal at home and make all my own coffee here. Even if things aren't as good as they used to be, they've still got us soundly beat in many regards.
The Biden administration has told key lawmakers it is sending a new package of more than $1 billion in arms and ammunition to Israel, three congressional aides said Tuesday....
And people are gaslighting themselves happily to suck up to the Dems instead of saying: “We will vote for you, but only, when you end this genocide and bring justice and peace to the people.”
Not just that, but they're twisting themselves into knots to try and convince people that unconditionally supporting Biden is the better option than continuing to pressure him to stop this and calling out his terrible stance here. Sure, everyone can vote as they please come election day, but we're a touch under 6 months out and people are all over this site browbeating anyone who doesn't toe the line and going "Don't you dare criticize our savior, Biden! If you say he needs to stop enabling Israel's genocide, you're just a Russian disinformation agent trying to keep people from voting so that fascists take over and murder all the minorities in the US. They'll probably double murder Palestinians, even!"
Damn, you got me, I missed the part where I said not to vote for Biden under any circumstances.
Way to prove the point. Elections are not today, there is no reason not to continue to criticize Biden and pressure him to change his position in a meaningful way in order to make him more electable for those who won't support him if he continues his current policy, and along you come with the same tired shtick to say "If you don't bend over backwards to sing his praises, you're a Russian plant!"
If Biden actually changed his stance in a meaningful way, there's still plenty of time for him to win back those voters, but you folks come along running to shout out "But Trump!!!!" once anyone suggests that maybe giving him unconditional support no matter how shitty his stances are isn't the best way to convince him to not be just as awful while he still has time to do so.
When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not...
And the artists put their shit on spotify because people believe that spending 15 dollars a month on a service that doesnt pay artists, apparently pays artists.
It's probably more a case of artists acknowledging the fact that streaming services are one of, if not the, primary sources of music discovery and consumption for many these days. Even if they won't make money off it, by not being available on these platforms, they may as well not exist for most people. That's something that only huge, already established names can pull without feeling it.
Sure, but the barrier to entry is significant enough to still deter most people. Even assuming they aren't bothering with port forwarding and seeding, most people seem like they can't be bothered with any pattern of consumption more complicated than finding content on major streaming platforms, and the music streaming services haven't yet gotten annoying enough for most people. They'll take a peek, go "Do I want FLAC, V0 or 320? WTF is an APE?" and bail again.
We can disagree as to whether it should be that way or not, but I'd wager that the reach of streaming services for a new band far exceeds that of uploading a torrent to a random tracker and hoping it takes off. Unless people already know of you to look for your music, you need to hope a huge number of them are just auto-snatching anything new. On private trackers, sure, you'll get a bunch of people who auto-snatch any FLAC upload from the current year, but you're talking about <50,000 users in those cases, and a good chunk of the auto-snatchers are just people looking to build buffer who won't even listen to most of what they snatch. On the other hand, nobody is auto-snatching all the torrents going up on public trackers, they'd run out of space in no time at all.
I think curation implies more depth and selectivity to the collection and perhaps a certain amount of active effort to obtain and maintain it. You're talking about hearing a song you like on the radio and clicking "buy," where the sort of person who would talk about their curated library would spend their weekends digging through crates looking for the final LP released on some random record label in 1985 they need to complete their collection of what is, to them, the pinnacle of early house music as released in Yugoslavia prior to the fall of the USSR. Even if it's not as hyper-specific as that example, I would expect them to at least have things meticulously tagged and organized.
I wouldn't really say it's anything beyond normal consumption, just like I wouldn't say someone who buys a hat or jersey once every few years when they see a sporting event live has a sports memorabilia collection. Sure, technically, any quantity of something united can count as a collection, but I think plenty of purchasing just falls within the normal bounds of average consumption and doesn't rise to the level of meriting a special term for it.
It bugs me when people say "the thing is is that" (if you listen for it, you'll start hearing it... or maybe that's something that people only do in my area.) ("What the thing is is that..." is fine. But "the thing is is that..." bugs me.)...
I don't care so much when I'm just listening to people talk, but there's something about seeing people use needs washed constructs in otherwise normally composed and edited messages that drives me absolutely mad, for some reason. Stuff like "I need paid more to afford to live there." I first started seeing it on reddit a few years ago, but it seems as though I'm seeing it more and more now, all over the place. It's not something that is used anywhere I've lived, and it's just jarring to see sentences constantly missing a couple of words. I suppose I expect more variance in spoken language, especially in less formal contexts, but seeing it written is something else.
The first one is something of a lost cause, so long as English grammar continues to be neglected in schooling. I very much doubt that more than a couple of students in my high school had ever heard the term subjunctive mood outside of French or Spanish lessons, where it was always presented as this very alien concept.
I don't think it's necessarily actually laziness, but rather a failure to change register as appropriate for the medium and context. The Yale link does show that the construct has its own grammatical structure that is followed, so to me, it's more an error akin to writing, "Yeah, so check this: World War I was started because many countries said 'You with me, bro?' and others replied, 'Yeah, you know it, boy' but then shit got real when this guy ran up on Archduke Franz Ferdinand and blasted him." when writing an essay.
Question: Megami Tensei - Where to start?
I've been passingly interested in the Megami Tensei series for a while....
African mercenaries are lured into the Russian army with an initial payment of $2,000, a $2,200 monthly salary, medical insurance, and a passport for the soldier and family members. ( sopuli.xyz )
https://t.me/DIUkraine/3873...
What song should I play for my bathroom neighbors?
The work bathroom is currently a warzone, on their phone speakers people like to play music, play games at full blast, and one guy likes to chill to ambient rainforest. What song can I play to passive aggressively make it known that I don't want to listen to their tik tok feeds while I work out my demons?
Microsoft word update messes up exams in Denmark ( www.dr.dk )
Sorry for the Danish post i hope you can translate it....
Kyle Rittenhouse Tells Native Americans They Can ‘Leave’ If They Hate America ( newsone.com )
Winamp has announced that it is opening up its source code to enable collaborative development of its legendary player for Windows ( about.winamp.com )
Detroit just had it's first population growth in 66 years. Huzzah!
Biden administration is sending $1 billion more in weapons, ammo to Israel, congressional aides say ( apnews.com )
The Biden administration has told key lawmakers it is sending a new package of more than $1 billion in arms and ammunition to Israel, three congressional aides said Tuesday....
After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year ( www.billboard.com )
When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not...
What linguistic constructions do you hate that no one else seems to mind?
It bugs me when people say "the thing is is that" (if you listen for it, you'll start hearing it... or maybe that's something that people only do in my area.) ("What the thing is is that..." is fine. But "the thing is is that..." bugs me.)...