Pretty much, when they removed search engines who wouldn’t pay them was the final straw and I went back to reddit (after not being there since the API debacle) 1 last time and replaced all my 26,000 karma worth of comments with “Comment removed in protest of Reddit blocking search engines.” Took me a while, but meh, if they want to hasten its enshitification, I don’t mind doing my part.
A Mary Sue can still fail, they just usually succeed. The biggest issues with a Mary Sue aren’t their success, its the believability of their success. Is it reasonable for this person to be so skilled. If they have PHD level knowledge in 15 different fields, that’s a bit much. But they may have PHD level knowledge in 1 or 2 fields, and they may be able to get through like that without coming off as a Mary Sue, look at The Martian by Andy Weir (or the movie with Matt Damon) The premise of sending people with 2 PHDs in complementary fields to reduce the number of people needing to be sent makes logical sense, so him being an expert, and also being the right kind of expert, to survive makes sense. And the fact he isn’t an expert in everything else helped drive the narrative and provided the direction and the plot in a reasonable and believable way.
I think that’s what is important, not making your character flawless, or even introducing some flaws to a flawless character, because that still ends up coming off weird, but instead start with a flawed character and then remove flaws until you have just enough to make everything the character needs to survive believable. Another view of this, Die Hard, John McClaine wasn’t the typical Mary Sue, he wasn’t perfect and the audience feels like he’s constantly in danger and just a mixture of skill and luck gets him through it. A flawed character is more impactful to the reader. I am a flawed person, I relate better to flawed people.
nowhere near VA, I’m in AZ, no experience with it there.
I’ve had some experience with Mint Mobile, but couldn’t get it to activate where I live. The sim worked fine visiting Vegas, but back in my home state, even though it runs on T-Mobile’s network and T-Mobile was fine, the same sim with a phone number with an area code in my home state didn’t work in my home state. So, maybe it works, but the one time I tried it wouldn’t work and Mint couldn’t get it working just kept saying everything is fine and it should be working.
Tried StraightTalk Wireless after that, 2 different sims so far, no issues, other than I had to get a new sim when the account was inactive for 6 to 8 months. But at least now their sim packs come with both Verizon and notVerizon compatible sims in the same pack now.
I use https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09TB83NR2?ref=emc_s_m_5_i_atc and I just don’t use the wifi, everything can be done on device or from a PC you plug the SD card into. I know you said you want it without wifi, but without more details I don’t know if “without wifi” is a necessity or if it just is fully functional without using “wifi” is sufficient for your needs. By default wifi is disabled while the camera has power to it and is recording, and its wifi enabled/disabled state can be changed in the menu to keep it off.
As someone who was forced to do this for a couple months when I was in the Army, rotating shifts destroys your ability to get good sleep, its horrendous to actually experience. It took about 2 months before people started getting so sleep deprived that people started failing PT (physical training) tests and it took the brigade commander looking at our battalion and asking “wtf is going on over there?” and hearing what our battalion had done to our shift schedule and put a stop to it. He called over every single soldier who failed their PT test to hear our excuses, and when most of us were first time failures and we all had the exact same complaint, by the time he got to me, he was like “You’ve been on rotating shifts, unable to sleep, and were forced to take this test after a shift when you’re completely exhausted like everyone else?” “yes sir” “ok, don’t expect that shift rotation to last, I’ll be talking to your battalion commander after this. Send in the next person.” Dude was ready to just start ripping into us but changed his tune right quick after hearing about the fucked up shift schedule and lack of any common sense in the leadership’s ability to plan properly. One of the few times where shit actually rolled uphill. Suffice it to say, before I even finished the drive back to my barracks, I was being called by my platoon sergeant that we’d have to a new schedule tomorrow and to just show up for swing shift like we normally would be on.
In the prison I worked at we would usually rotate shifts every 6 months, but our commander heard complaints about people being on day shift for so long at one time that they were getting burnt out dealing with 90% of the problem times with inmates, and instead of changing it to every 3 months, changed the rotation to every 2 days. Literally, 2 days on Day shift, 2 days on Swing shift, 2 days on Night shift, 1 day off, then back to days. And that last day was getting off shift at 6AM, doing PT until 8AM, Barracks Maintenance until 10 AM, then because of the rotation, we’d have to be back in at work at 5:30 AM the next day, so our 1 day off a week was only 19.5 hours, and you’re exhausted but you can’t sleep yet, otherwise you’ll be up all night before work the next day, so you force yourself to run on fumes, getting a haircut, getting food and supplies for the next week, etc. Then sleeping, so there was literally never any time to relax. It fucking sucked.
Gmail wasn’t even the first, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, there were tons of free email offerings, even sites that would host your whole website for free like geocities. Gmail came into the market when 3rd party email being free was already well established. They just followed an Apple style of development, taking something that already exists and made a better version of it. Also back then their motto was still “Don’t Be Evil” and they mostly still kept to it, so they used that goodwill and the better user experience to grow it at a massive rate. And for the most part, its still the best experience for email for many cases.
I use Blink cameras for my outdoors, but they also make indoor cameras as well and with the Sync Module you can keep clips and have motion detection without storing any data on the cloud or needing a subscription. Cheap, but they work well. Their “Cloud” service was shit when I tried it with the 30 days free, so shit, I ended up canceling it so I could just use the Sync Module after about 2 weeks.
They have a lot of rich but unfortunate princes though, so there must be something to sustain all the royalty trying to give me their money.
I moved from Washington state to Arizona, no regrets. The dry heat is so much better than the cold. If it was someplace humid like Florida though, fuck that noise. Been there in July/August and it feels like an old man’s asscrack in a sauna. I’ll take a few days of 120+ with no humidity here over 95+ with 100% humidity
IANAL, so take this with a grain of salt, but from my understanding, Its legal, though it may be unenforceable. If I want to sue them, they will say I agreed to arbitration in the contract, I will ignore that and continue to file. They will counter-file that I agreed to arbitration by accepting the EULA and that the case should be dropped, I will counter-file that I only agreed to it under duress because it was either agree or throw away my TV and that the arbitration clause is invalid because of X, Y or Z. At this point either the Judge will decide to listen to arguments from both sides then make a decision or will decide based on the undisputed facts presented by both sides and will either invalidate the EULA and allow the lawsuit to continue, or will uphold the EULA and drop the case with prejudice, or will allow me to make another argument and drop the case without prejudice allowing me to re-file with a better case.
The issue is, is it worth it to spend that kind of time and money for it in the first place? If you don’t have an open and shut case and can’t file in a state where you can make Roku pay the legal fees, in general whatever you’re trying to accomplish will cost you more than just getting off their ecosystem, which is what they are counting on. Since you would have to sue them just to see if you can sue them, it just adds extra time, money, and effort into suing them that it is more likely to deter people from actually suing and instead choosing to arbitrate under their terms which, depending on the ethical considerations of the company, could be fair or it could be heavily skewed in their favor. At which point you can decide at that point if you should sue and then will also have any evidence acquired about an unfair arbitration in the filings as well.
Either way, the legality is perfectly legal to be in an EULA, its enforceability though is mostly only backed by how much time, money, and effort it would take to bypass it. Like if there is an open door with a sign saying “Please use next door” and the next door leads to the same place as the open door. Most of us will just use the next door because its not worth the effort to deal with whatever issue might occur if we used the open door. But if the “next” door is locked, we’d just go in the open door because its no longer worth the effort to deal with procedures the company wants.
We just use Discord. My daughter is 11 and has been on Discord for a while and uses it to talk to her friends while they are all gaming together, and can use it on her computer, phone, and tablet so she doesn’t have to switch devices just to talk. Granted my daughter does have her own phone number, but she’ll still use discord for her group chats just because of its ease of use and the ability for her and her friends to jump on a call to mine some crafts or ro some blox or whatever it is kids do these days.
yeah, I had heard of that, I’m hoping that since it was a while ago and most of them were the ones done by automated systems and not going through it comment by comment editing them, but I’ll keep at it, if I have to sneak one edit through a day or something.