I kind of wish that multi-unit housing came with sound isolation ratings. That’d create an incentive to have better isolation and help customers weigh the tradeoffs.
I’m skeptical that it will scale – it costs to host video – but it’s there. You can host something on any PeerTube host willing to serve your content and link to it from the Threadiverse, same as you could on YouTube.
Mine is that I can’t stand the Deadpool movies. They are self aware and self referential to an obnoxious degree.
I haven’t read the comic books that they’re based on for a long time, but as I recall, they also break the fourth wall. I don’t think that that was introduced specifically for the movie.
Marvel’s Deadpool is known for his over-the-top violence and crude and crass humor, but perhaps his best-known character trait is his penchant for repeatedly breaking the fourth wall. Deadpool talks to the audience in comics, films and videogames - but he didn’t always have this power. In fact, early Deadpool was known for being quite serious and firmly rooted in the fictional realm…so when did the Merc with a Mouth first break the fourth wall - and how did he insult editors everywhere by doing so?
Deadpool and the assassin with superhuman accuracy Bullseye teamed up in previous issues, and in Deadpool #28, the two are reunited after a long absence. “How long has it been!?” Bullseye exclaims. Deadpool simply states “Issue sixteen.” It’s the smallest of fourth-wall breaks (he hadn’t even began speaking to the readers yet), but it shows that Deadpool is doing more than acting out - he’s acting as his own editor. Considering convoluted comics continuity, it’s normal for editors to occasionally place footnotes in certain panels, specifically when characters reference past events. Perhaps Kelly and Woods considered the old method, but wanted to try a new technique. Whatever their reasoning, Deadpool’s fourth wall breaks became a staple of the character.
Looks like Deadpool #28dates to 1997, though, so Deadpool breaking the fourth wall has been around for over a quarter of a century.
I rigged up a simulated sunrise about 20 years back with a regular light, a computer, and an X10 controller back when I slept in a room without windows and wanted a more-gentle way of waking up than an alarm clock. So I totally get wanting to simulate a sunrise.
But why do you want to simulate a sunset?
Also, you might want to ask on !homeautomation, as they specialize in this sort of thing.
Robin Hood is another example of a set of works that had many people contributing different stories into what became the present-day collection.
Historically, a lot of works had many authors using the same character. I think that it’s a bit unfortunate that modern copyright law tends to discourage that.
H. P. Lovecraft was unusual in that he allowed other authors to make use of his characters (and settings, which are also covered by copyright), which is why his world – with Cthulhu and all that – has been widely used.
I mean, if there was a single internationally-popular movie or series that you could choose to take issue with as being “too American”, this doesn’t seem like it’d be the one I’d choose.
I wouldn’t call one “not a real game”. If you like them, great, play them. I have not been very happy with mobile games, myself, however.
A couple of reasons:
While they don’t have to do so, many mobile games appear to me to be designed to cater to people playing in short spurts. That is, you don’t have to build up a lot of metal state about the game; you can play a bit while waiting in a line or something, put the thing on hold, do something else, come back. A lot of my favorite games don’t work like that.
For a number of genres, using a touchscreen is a serious limitation, because part of the screen is obstructed by fingers. Phones can use external input devices, usually via Bluetooth, and so you can make a game that requires an external input device, but it’s an inconvenience to lug one around with a phone, so smartphone games generally need to be designed to be at least reasonably-able to be played on the touchscreen alone. That places some constraints on the way the game can work.
Touchscreen accuracy is limited compared to a mouse pointer, which again limits a number of genres of games.
Not everyone using a smartphone game can be playing sound while doing so; carrying headphones/earbuds around isn’t something that all players will do. That means that smartphone games generally need to be playable without sound, which is a constraint that PC games generally don’t have.
The major benefit smartphones have is that they’re mobile. A smartphone can generally run for a while, as long as most of that is idling. Playing games in most genres burns through their battery quickly. You can carry USB powerstations, but kind of a pain.
Even in genres – like turn-based ones – that really don’t need much battery consumption, for some reason, game developers – unlike developers of many other application types – often seem to feel the need to have stuff going on while nothing’s happening in the game, burning battery life. I’d like to have the option to minimize battery usage.
I would say that a greater proportion of smartphone games than PC games have in-app purchases and ads, neither of which I like.
Many game genres tend to benefit from a wider field of view. Smartphone screens held normally take up a very small portion of one’s visual field.
I am not particularly enthusiastic about having Google track and profile me. A large portion of the commercial games on Android require that one use Google Play Services and this requires a Google account. I’m not willing to get a Google account. This limits availability of many commercial games. I have no problem with getting a GOG account on the PC, and am at least less concerned about Valve, with Steam, than Google.
I have no idea why, but a higher percentage of mobile games seem to go for a cutesy, simplified vector aesthetic. Maybe it’s because they need to run on screens that may vary a great deal in size; I don’t know, but it’s there. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that style, but I’m not especially enthusiastic about it. The Game Boy had the same “cutesy” tendency back when, relative to larger, fixed consoles, so maybe it’s to deal with small screens.
Most mobile games I’ve played that I’ve liked (e.g. Shattered Pixel Dungeon) are also available on the PC, and I find that it’s more-comfortable to play there.
So for me, at least, the mobile gaming experience hasn’t really been one that I’ve been all that happy with.
I could certainly see games that I think would work well with a smartphone. Choice of Games-type multiple-choice interactive fiction, or gamebooks. Those are (or at least can be) light on a battery, are fine on a touchscreen. I’ve generally played those on a tablet rather than a phone – I think that even with those, more screen space is desirable, given the option – but I have done those, and I think that they’re all right. Annoyingly-enough, Twine games – which I would think could be a good match for mobile – aren’t, because Android browsers don’t have an ability to view file:// URLs and Twine builds pages that don’t always work well on small mobile screens. There hasn’t been the kind of explosion of freely-available games in this genre that there have been for the keyboard-oriented Z-Machine and TADS interactive fiction VMs on the PC, though.
Deckbuilding games – though I’d rather have ones without animation or 3D stuff going on, to reduce battery consumption – would be another possibility that I’d like. If cards are designed for a small screen, I think that it’d be reasonable.
I agree with the insight that a lot of news has a really negative focus. That is, a lot of things like murders or disasters or the like that don’t really have all that much direct impact on the lives of most people are very mediagenic, so get disproportionately-heavy coverage. We wind up with a really skewed-negative perspective in the news media relative to reality.
However, I also have to say that I wasn’t necessarily blown away by some past efforts I’ve seen along the lines of remedying this either – that is, a lot of feel-good stories aren’t necessarily all that important to someone’s life either. Not to say that someone can’t want and consume feel-good stories either, but if one’s goal is to try to pick up useful information, probably what one would best read is neither material about shark attacks, nor about someone who overcame cancer or whatnot.
I don’t really want to force a specific bottom limit on sound insulation, which is what that would do, though.
Some people won’t care as much as others relative to price and may not want to pay what it’d cost. And some people may want a much-quieter unit than any bottom limit would place.
The problem is that they can’t make an informed decision now because the information isn’t available.
If OP is in the US – which I assume he is, from the inch measurement – I’d bet that he can probably rent one at a large hardware store, like Home Depot, if he doesn’t have any use for one outside of this.