If anything was really done, I assume it’d be just opening up (+incentivizing) immigration. Skilled labor/health/money probably will still be huge barriers, so I think the most effect it could have would be brain drain.

Pictures I already had:

1st one, the room is made via a gridmap (4 tiles so far for hallways/rooms, not counting a generic cube).

This one is a desktop screenshot, but the models in the background are VC (the eye was made in Godot 2D as well, animated)

Never had one but have family who has their VR headsets and aren’t really using them, borderline useless if you aren’t willing to use their ecosystem. They were having some trouble with their accounts (probably related to account migrations) and seemed too unsettled by the paper wall of text about being part of an organization to unlock dev mode.

Oops I meant 4.3

Alright. For what little I do, I have just been focusing on the stuff I’ve described. The last time I tried something with the default physics, I had a door that instantly flied off the hinges into the sky. (I was able to fix it, but couldn’t do much with it due to it being complicated with a characterbody which I assume will be similar with Jolt)

enabling dev mode on the quest is easy, I’ve done it a few times!

EDIT: On top of what I said below, I think the facebook–>meta transition might be an issue too. They might’ve even originally been using an Oculus account.

Issue is they haven’t used it in a while so that causes issues with the account to unlock it. That and the fact that there is even the hint of it being restricted to someone part of an organization (I am not sure if it’s even still true or if they really just don’t check) sounds overcomplicated at-best and something they will be wary/scared of doing at-worst.

This is not the newest device, I thought I had read that the firmware had opened this up. I got to use the menu for less than a minute (cool hand tracking+overlay and even the grainy AR display was my sort of aesthetic) and decided to apply an update thinking it’d just reveal dev mode in the settings… after the update it seemingly couldn’t do anything other than spinny loading circle (I didn’t see how to get to the settings again).

Neat. I am probably not going to use 3.X though (nor do I want to set up Jolt), and 4.4 is on dev 7 right now (as of ~20 days ago).

I also want to leverage as much as I can from the editor (and have it work smoothly) and later versions offer more. Textmesh is one of those things, probably procedural audio eventually. XR maybe, too (though this depends on my family members figuring out how to unlock dev mode with facebook BS so I can borrow the headset, if they even will figure it out). There are likely many other quality-of-life features/fixes I’m forgetting.

There was a 2D feature in 4.X that I was interested in, but there are viability concerns so it should be obvious that I’m leaning more into 3D given that polygonal art is already well supported there.

For language support I mentioned, it’s there in 3.X too but hasn’t been updated in 3 years.

I haven’t done much. Only techniques so far, which is mostly just vertex colors+low-poly. The meshes are made with the color in-mind (+painted at the same time), also real-world reference scale. Game engine I’m using is Godot.

I’m trying to make a comprehensive set of general-use materials, ideally for an import script. If I use textures, there will not be many. In-engine noise works for some things, I am happy with a metal material and somewhat with glass materials. A billboardY material also works great (distance fade allows it as an easy ‘interact’ icon in 3D).

Not so happy with transparency or object scale (and still needing to mess with UVs), I made a visual shader material that allows adding a color for models that don’t have VC (specifically: textmesh)… I tried to use a shader for a pitted stone with fancy lighting, it didn’t turn out how I wanted and it seems like the possible complexity is too much for me.

More recently I’ve attempted to bring in grayscale watercolor to break up the flat color of the VC. Taking a picture with a DSLR, turn it into an optimized 512x texture. I tried to do a matcap but that didn’t work (maybe the matcap shaders I found weren’t right for non-metallic), a splatter texture seems to be alright. Gives away seams easily, default triplanar is not great either.

I might do unshaded stuff (with-or-without manual VC shading), but I haven’t tried vertex lighting yet. Though I will likely do a mix of styles, especially with obvious reasoning.

I had some example images uploaded but unfortunately my instance currently has all images broken. What I have isn’t much and it isn’t even very cohesive yet, anyhow.

Also, Spyro is one inspiration for these techniques, and I will probably make a vertex color skybox eventually.

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I am using Nim-lang via GDextension, also waiting for Godot 4.4 to release because of Jolt physics (I’m thinking it will make beginner projects more viable).

are you a lighthouse keeper living far from any city and getting your groceries airdropped?

find friends even in sub-optimal situations (e.g. at a grocery store)

You seem to be focusing your points on the loneliness crisis, which is a real issue

Given my mention of transportation, I am talking about not being able to easily access even a grocery store (but also, terrible idea). Yes, not being near a city.

However to your 3rd quote here, my mention of WoW was not simply about loneliness but the idea that one may find help via someone online (likely a romantic partner wanting to cohabitate and maybe even help someone else move to a better place, though even less likely for half of the population) but I cut some of that context for brevity.

(also the idea that somebody can/will provide that much help is already not great)

keep on trying keep trying keep going

build foundational social skills

maybe one day maybe that person maybe

If money/employment and depression+personality disorders weren’t a thing on top of everything else already mentioned yeah, maybe.

And on top of that there are other deal-breakers like not wanting kids, or being non-religious in USA (which on its own cuts out a huge chunk of the population, especially in more rural areas), not someone who goes to bars. At this point, you may as well tell someone to play the lottery. In a game of numbers, not everyone has good odds.

Although as others will point out a relationship (or having friends) is likely not going to be a fix-all. So this is more like having 5+ major core issues that even one of which is unlikely to to improve particularly because of the other issues.

Suicide is always unreasonable.

Well you’ve contradicted yourself there 'cause you said we were stationary gave 2 examples of rational reasoning a minute ago.

I think when someone has been suffering consistently for over a decade it’s not short-sighted. Especially considering long-term issues with their environment. Chronic illness (ruining QoL and shortening lifespan), lack of transportation, no social life etc adds to it. The glaring societal problems aren’t new, and are likely getting worse rather than better.

Even looking at anecdotes (“We met on WoW”), lots of people don’t even have the circumstances to allow that slim chance.

That’s going to heavily depend on location, resources/money, and health. The very issues at hand here. Many people would love to just leave, they don’t because they lack even a viable destination. And it’s not great to travel on foot or be homeless when it’s freezing outside.

Intentional communities are probably a more realistic thing in the US, but even then if it were such an effective option it seems like less people would be homeless. The closest one to me has no info on living costs/expectations and a $50 fee for a “tour” (so it likely is not a saving option for those who can barely maintain themselves).

EDIT: Backpacking/military might make more sense for those that live in Europe. Similarly, the monk thing is going to depend on beliefs and allowed/expected lifestyle, so I don’t expect that to be viable for most either.

Now you’re pushing cautious optimism?

In OP’s defense, the description here is the subheading for the article. Thus me saying

posting this without comment

Wrong? Certainly not. But do you think spending the entire election demoralizing closest-to-the-left had no effect? (note: the iceberg of non-voters who aren’t directly counted in the uncommitted movement)

This is not to say that the DNC strategy was great, but I am not sure by what metric your own was much better. Particularly as even from the beginning it seemed like a gamble, requiring Harris to win while also having notably high 3rd-candidate turnout.

EDIT: Newer headlines make this even more obvious:

‘Very troubling’: Leader of ‘Abandon Harris’ movement now anxious about Trump appointees

Key leaders of the “Abandon Harris” movement, which encouraged voters to oppose Kamala Harris due to U.S. support for Israel during the Gaza war, are now expressing unease about Trump’s incoming administration.

concerns are growing over his Cabinet picks, such as Mike Huckabee and Tulsi Gabbard, which some see as troubling for Muslim communities.

You of all people posting this without comment. The only thing funnier (and sadder) is “cautious optimism about Trump”.

They seem to distance themself from anything in sarco-pod territory, though.

Not much help when you’re “not suffering enough” but can’t get what you need. And things are only going to get worse in the near future.

It would be more than that if people had a place to go and a way to get there.

Also it’s not just trumpism, it’s that your family can be intelligent but fall for grifters… or they will be kind 90% of the time and then without prompt will casually say something really fucked up at dinner.

I understand fragmentation here, as you can get what you need in a format that works well-enough.

Different package formats often have technical differences. Recently I had the choice to use something from a flatpak to reduce lib32 dependencies on my system… but I didn’t go with that as the other dependencies it needed (openGL, graphics driver etc) were redundant thanks to sandboxing (~2GB download!).

Anything native from itch, GOG, or humble doesn’t really ‘install’ but rather they are just extracted… so the files should be what it is (portable, except game saves/user data likely won’t be). This allows you to run it off of a slower+larger-capacity drive.

EDIT: Also if you need to compile it, probably will also just compiled to where you put it (to a bin folder).

Non-system stuff like this is more viable for things that you don’t need updated frequently/ever (particularly games/software post-development). For sure most-of-the-time the best experience is via your package manager.

Bad wording on my part, I meant a general and underlying chronic defect (like bad collagen) rather than situational/habitual damage.

Go to hospital? No thanks, finish what you started. Take my other organs, lady.

(for medical reasons, I doubt anybody would actually want my organs though)

A new YT video by a chemist (NY66qpMFOYo, go to 6:35) just came out highlighting that the acidity causes sucrose to invert into 50:50 glucose:fructose over time anyways, so it makes even less sense. And there’s more sodium.

I like Isomaltulose (glucose-fructose with a stronger bond, making it metabolize slower) but it’s expensive and not as sweet. Though maybe other types of sweeteners could be used like this, perhaps in combination for a better flavor profile.

My assumption here is that sugar would need to be dissolved, mixed, and emulsified with more care/difficulty than hfcs. Though if there is any issue here it might not be present until a product has sat on the shelf (or in your house) for too long. Also for gritty, I was thinking more for something like ketchup or other sauces.

I’m also not saying this is a fault of sugar itself, but that hfcs allows highly sweetened products to be produced more easily (which may present said issue if high sugar content is kept 1:1 despite no longer using hfcs).

Agreed, but I have doubts that this will be a massive improvement if the same amount of other sugars are used. I’m sure some things would reduce sugar to fit with production, but if some foods just became gritty (or, soda with sugar sinking to the bottom) I would not be shocked.

Particularly because that seems like the easy-but-wrong-answer. Not that “maybe we shouldn’t make sugar cheaper than water” and “food doesn’t need to be loaded with sugar to taste good” should be unpopular opinions.