I think people should go back to more subsitence farming

Dawg c’mon. I’m picking up other posts of you here but the rural countryside can’t be the backbone of society and also be subsistence farming - that doesn’t work out, nevermind the truck trips that require all of the rest of society to pay for this stuff.

For a very long time rural communities would have their own internal economy with their own shops, and services, and it worked well. But then Walmart style stores came in and decimated it.

So what do you figure happened here? Why did people abandon all of their own shops for walmart?

All the wealth is extracted by massive companies and sent elsewhere

I’m being super for real right now: What fucking wealth does your average rural community create unless it has an active coal mine or similar attached to it, which is in the decimal of percents - at least in the west. Statistically all of this stuff is getting subsidized to no end by every city or halfway urban development.

Are you asking what my ultimate model of rural life would be? Like if I was a god just designing society from scratch?

No, I am asking you how you figure any of the problems that rural life brings could be solved. Like not by you as a person doing things, in a systematic way.

Nothing can change in the now and there’s 0 vision for how anything could change either under the current system or an optimal one doesn’t seem like a compelling argument for one particular reason; it doesn’t grapple with the today. You can be stuck in car-dependent-bullshit through little to no fault of your own - I’ll fully accept that’s your situation. Where does one go for here?

I buy the consumer goods made with child and our slave labour, hard not to do unless you go full hermit about it, this isn’t moral grandstanding by me. The car transportation I solved, don’t ask me who mined my phones rare earth minerals. My solution to make this better though would be state mandated laws that make phones repairable, better laws around software so they don’t brick your shit (either directly or indirectly) and you don’t buy them new every 2 years on a contract. I am as powerless or powerful to enact any of this directly, but I’d argue for it at every opportunity. What’s the exit scenario here?

I don’t get why these people don’t just become protestants or whatever. Like is their entire access to catholicism seriously just the aesthetic vibes? Thinking the pope wrong about shit is a solved problem ffs.

What’s the end goal here as per the problems and such you mentioned about rural life? All the billionaires get merc’d, socialism instituted - how’s that look like?

It requires systemic changes.

All of which you are arguing against here

I think at this point I’m just negatively polarized against it because half of the damn games seem to be in those DLCs and I don’t respect that

There’s smaller garbage trucks though, you don’t have to use the ones that I’d guess pop in your mind as the average suburbian one.

So why would I pay out the ass to have a trash service? […] And compare that to me taking a 5 minute detour on a grocery run in a truck I already need for other things anyway.

This is getting circular in logic, unless all reasons to own / use a truck stop at once there’s always something you could point to as to why you’d need it anyways and therefore does not justify paying for anything that makes the truck not needed on that particular front. The current model, even if you were to shift it all to EVs, is hugely unsustainable and very much subsidized to no end though, in substantial part somebody else is just picking up the bill here.

or have free street parking

just to note, that just shifts the monetary costs from one person to all of society

I don’t do a weekly shop anymore, i order online and it comes to me.

That feels pretty contingent about being in a somewhat urban area tbh.

Like as someone who lives in a rural area I use a truck to take my trash to the dump

This is logistically stupid even in a rural area. A garbage truck going to every house is still going to be more efficient than whatever number of trucks going to the dump.

I’d argue most white collar work in germany which is the context for this. maybe not so much in some of the more male dominated, toxic tending fields but legally you have a right to go part time unless there’s real good reason for your employer to say no. It’s far from everyone but not exactly an insignifcant share of the workforce here that this’d apply to. I don’t really mean it as universal, either, just as a point that even given the very real options to be less car dependent people don’t tend to work it out

I see I am foiled again on account of not purchasing and having no will to purchase the DLCs for Dishonored. At this point it feels like those games should have two distinct ratings

How do you transport groceries?

If you bicycle-only it you kind of have to change the weekly shop to 2-3 trips a week, best included in your commute, dunno how feasible that is for rural / suburban (assuming) america.

On a technical level panniers.

I agree heavily here but I think the stronger case is usually much more finance-based but you have to look at the cost not from a carbrain perspective. The german green travel sphere has this concept of “effective time” which I think is useful, because it considers opportunity costs.

I.e. if your car journey is 30 mins and your train journey is 45 mins but you can work 30 mins on the train because your job allows that, you save 15 mins per trip, even if it ls longer. Or even expressed in more cold, hard, cash agreements to pick up your post here: If you spend 4 hours a week at work to pay for your car, supposing you also drive everywhere else, you’re like a a few bicycle trips in your private life away from working a 4 day week and come out the same financially.

It’s not strictly historical because the game isn’t but the shift from whale oil to wind as a power source in Dishonored 1 and 2 bothered me. They do some real unrealistic bullshit with the whale oil but then that is a world of supernatural powers and such and the stuff glows blue. Maybe it’s just that energy dense it can power the electric tesla coil gate that vaporizes anything, sure, works for me, it’s victorian england but instead of coal it runs on whale and everything is cranked to 11.

Then two comes around and the electric tesla coil gate that vaporizes shit is powered by rinky-dink windmills and it destroys my belief in the whole setting, the wind ain’t exactly supernatural. This is an absolute monarchy with explicit knowledge of the wind turbine that can generate enough power to stand in for the near-magical-energy-dense whale oil and they decide not to use it everywhere? Dunwall’s fucking windy, where’s the windmills? Not even from an animal rights perspective, the whaling work is described as gruelling and dangerous. It’s an absolute monarchy you don’t even have to futz around with some sort of whalepetro-lobby for christ sakes.

I get that the desert aesthetic of Karnaca doesn’t mesh well with the grimy whale oil thing they had going on and they wanted to switch it up but like just use actual oil at that point!

The whole concept of time is money just doesn’t seem to compute for people when it comes to cars. If you’re stuck in car centric hellworld you’re excused and all but I swear to god half my white collar co-workers could reduce their working hours by like 25% if they just opted out of car payments for like a reasonable used car and then, especially given the fuel prices now, just cycled when it’s feasible.

The usual argument is they work so hard and long, i.e. full time, and it’s a comfort they like paying for but I’m pretty sure they never even bothered to do any math and figured out that they wouldn’t even have to work full time if they didn’t insist on a, to me, fancy car, to get there.

what if you pedal down the hill and it’s making you slower because you ride a fixie

But where should I even start?

MGS1 and then go order of release, anyone who says anything different for this series detests art

Which ones are skippable?

Ghost Babel, MG1, MG2, both Ac!ds and Portable Ops unless you REALLY enjoy the MGS stories or peace walkers gameplay, Revengeance probably unless you like character action games

Metal Gear Solid PS1

Definitely the OG one, Twin Snakes is sort of a fine take on a reimagining but it loses much charm compared to the original one

what are some tips I should know?

If you come from MGS1 to 2, you might’ve never used the first person feature barring some forced gameplay sections or maybe to gawk at the cool artstyle. Use it in 2 liberally. You’ll understand.

Starting at 2 whatever bullshit you can think of to do with combining items and systems, the devs likely thought of it. You can just cover-to-cover-sneak and knock out or shoot people, but half the fun is in the odd things you can do

Definitely play MGS3: Subsistence over Snake Eater. The game does work better with OTS view.

Starting at 2, if you feel a cutscene of importance coming up, make sure you have time to actually view them. I think the worst of the worst is MGS4 at 90 minutes. Excluding Peace Walker these tend to be games that aren’t really well suited to 30 minute playing sessions

For a lot of later Peace Walker the absolutely most crucial, critical item is the resupply radio thingy. Keep it in mind.

Play MGS V on PC so you can easily load sick tunes in

it’s been so long

This comes up in inspections for you all?

Yeah, albeit these don’t have inspections. But if you do wrong sized tyres suddently the thing isn’t street legal at all anymore, i.e. you’re riding around in something not street legal, uninsured, which kind of like a medium crime. So not really plausible.

That bicycle speedometer (based on GPS, I assume)

Nah, wheel size and a magnet + sensor attached at the front wheel mostly. Reports from GPS bicycle speedometers is if you put them into the faraday cage that is this thing they don’t work so great anymore and they don’t exactly come with an antenna port

something that i would find joy in.

I’d guess these aren’t viable for but honestly, surprisingly fun ride! Especially empty these have some pick-up to them and there isn’t a lot of dampening and shielding involved. Felt much more like doing 40kph on a bicycle than 40kph in a car on both speed perception and also comfort

I’ve been enjoying the shit out of riding my cheap ass bike for runs to my city library and my favorite beer store in on the other side of town (most of my commuting tbh). I’m seriously considering getting a little half-height basket to slap on my front rack in the near future.

Hell yeah