some additional relevant statistics

united states barely saw 1% growth year over year and are projecting that growth to continue to slow.

India has nearly 3x the users of the United States. the u.s. is still second because it’s the country it started in, but it’s not far ahead of the 3rd and 4th place countries. India is an extreme outlier.

unfortunately they don’t break down the age demographic by region, but I’d bet that if we specifically look at daily active users in the United States the age demo would skew much older.

so, it seems like it’s similar to what many fast food restaurants have been experiencing lately. the growth opportunities in the United States dried up so the decided to push like hell everywhere else. i bet the growth they saw in India over the last decade was explosive. probably bigger than anything they had ever seen before. bigger than when it was still growing in the u.s… meanwhile they project that over the next decade in the u.s. they’ll see maybe 8% user growth and that’s pretty optimistic.

so we probably won’t actually see much Facebook marketing in the u.s… the only way they can capture more u.s users is by buying more apps, like when they bought Instagram.

this does seem to imply that the part of the world where Facebook has become a fact of life is very specifically India. I’m sorry to hear that for them.

i primarily use lemmy these days, but still have to use a few other things.

I still browse reddit for this like episode discussion threads for amine and other tv. lemmy will have maybe 5 responses in the threads for the 3 biggest shows of a season. it’s just not there yet.

I’m also a videographer, in our modern age that means i NEED to be on Instagram, YouTube, and tiktok because those are the platforms everyone wants me to make things for. can’t know how to make things for a platform I don’t use, sadly. especially since “just make something good” doesn’t work on any of them. in fact making something that looks good is often more of a hinderence these days and it kills me.

i hate short form video. i hate every mainstream social media platform. i just want to make pretty videos and not have to deal with tiktok trends. I learned 10 ways to attach a lav mic secure and tidy in school. I must now hold the lav mic in my fingers because that’s what’s trendy and following the trends is the ONE thing that DEFINITELY works.

I hate what has come of my profession. at this point I’m just ready for the ai to take my job so i can blow my head off in peace.

only because people never stopped asking it to be able to id birds.

that would mean constantly checking behind him and missing the show. I’m with the other commentor. the onus is on the short person to get in front of him. if he tries to stop them then he might be at fault. that said, it’s also not fair to expect someone to stand at the back just because they’re tall.

kind of, it’s more like it starts a geralt’s story, but becomes ciri’s story. the first two books are all geralt. after that it’s about geralt and ciri’s relationship. then by the last book we barely even see geralt.

then after the series was finished he started writing more little stories from earlier in geralt’s life.

as i said in another comment. it’s downright bizarre that ciri doesn’t get mentioned until the third game. she almost makes more sense as the protag anyway.

no, but she kind of wanted to… but it’s also way more fucked than that. please don’t make me type it out here. I’ll just say it involves violent rape while she’s still under age. it could be construed as a trauma response, but it’s debatable… I’m not convinced that sapkowski would have known what a trauma response was when he wrote that scene in the… 90s?

can’t actuality remember which book that happened in.

oh yeah, it’s been a while. details at foggy.

anyone who has read the books was likely surprised that ciri wasn’t the main character of any of the games when they first started coming out :::especially since geralt dies at the end of the books :::

ciri was more the mc than geralt for most of the books. she’s the child of destiny. she’s the young character that grows up as we follow their journey. she’s the one that finds herself and shows major character development throughout the books. the only character development geralt goes through is accepting his bond with ciri.

the first two games never mentioning ciri was outright bizarre tbh. only even remotely possibly because geralt lost his memory. like, with where geralt as at by the end of the books the only thing you could possibly expect him to do on regaining his memory is frantically search for signs of his adopted daughter

to a longtime book reader my reaction to ciri being the protag of the next game was “FINALLY”

my only curiosity at this point is how much she’ll be like book ciri. does she know magic? in the books ciri goes to sorceress school and then gets trained in primal magic by unicorns and immortal space elves. can you fuck a horse? that was one of the more… questionable scenes in the book.

tangent: sapkowski’s politics occasionally bleed through in weird ways in the books. like three’s a scene where a woman finds out she’s pregnant mid way through a literal war that our band wades through on their journey to save the world. the party basically needs the woman to proceed. she does not want the child. i believe it was the product of rape. yet for some reason geralt and a literal fucking vampire convince her that abortion is wrong and she should keep it instead of drinking a potion about it. it was so randomly out of character for everyone involved. but hey, that’s catholics for you i guess… /tangent

i think they generally said that ciri lost her elder blood powers after the king of the hunt was killed right? otherwise I’m gonna be really curious how handle that as well. she should be sort of the world’s greatest sorceress otherwise. ooh, i wonder if she’ll make quips about cyberpunk and/or other worlds she’s traveled to. like, she spent Decent bit of time in Arthurian legend. she shows up briefly in Victorian London.

also, what will the world at large look like? they can’t do it like the last time where your previous save could alter the new game based on your decisions. you were simply able to do too much. they’d need to make like 3 entirely separate stories at the very least. like, who rules the north? are you the empress of nilfguard? is the church burning all the nonhumans at record pace? you can basically decide the entire fate of the northern realms and all of its people in multiple ways… unless it just takes place elsewhere. maybe we’ll be in zerrikania this time or some shit. there are many distant lands that the games never take us. it would be much more doable that way. then you’d just have to change dialogue and maybe swap out a few characters.

aaaanyway… yeah, anyone mad about her being the mc is a dumbass that doesn’t know shit about the story.

but we have had a school shooting recently, Trump said “these things happen” about it.

that’s it. that’s what the fascists say about us dying. they ONLY care about the rich.

redux is a synonym of remake and remaster.

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my mom did similar, I eventually learned that’s why I didn’t like koolaide. it always tasted watery and weird to me…

yeah, many departments still get trained on “stockholm syndrome” despite it being thoroughly debunked and only ever part of pop-psych. in fact, the only “experts” that ever pushed it WERE police training “experts”. the whole situation in stockholm was competely misrepresented. the women didn’t love the bank robber, they just feared that the actions the police were taking would cost them their lives and thus begged them to do things differently. the police are the ones that locked them in a bank vault with the attacker. this, among a few other misreports by said police, resulted in a media circus about these women falling in love and not wanting to be saved. the idea that the police could be dangerous to these women was inconceivable to the public at the time.

it was a classic case of the police bungling a rescue and nearly costing multiple innocent lives to try to protect capitol, then ending up causing more damage than the thief was going to steal anyway. the women involved were barely studied after, but it was quickly concluded that the police were wrong about the women and that this syndrome they named was bunk. it was never in the dsm. it was never accepted science. too bad copeganda doesn’t care about facts. as i said, this shit is so sold to American police officers to this day.

there’s a great radiolab podcast from around December that talks to the survivors about it. you can go and listen to their side of the story if you want. they were terrified of the attacker the entire time and the police just kept making things worse for them.

where they getting American lithium?

the risks have been so incredibly thoroughly tested and found to not exist in a meaningful way. whether you trust science to be able to tell us that is irrelevant. i just wish we had a government that listened to science and data again.

Maybe, but apparently we’re tariffing multiple uninhabited islands. It would seem that active trade is not a perquisite for tariffs these days. can’t be having people move out there and not getting tariffed in the future.

I hope he puts tariffs on Mars next. Maybe after he falls out with musk.

there’s always handheld gaming pcs being released and going nowhere. the current generation includes the rog Ally and the Lenovo legion.

if you don’t follow this stuff religiously you’ve probably never heard of them, but they are out there. it’s just that no one really buys them.

the steam deck is the first successful one, but companies have been trying to make something like this for years.

because it feels off balance.

the level of the horizon is a key part of composition. it effects comfort, balance, and groundedness. when the horizon is not level it will feel disorienting, dizzy, or chaotic. yes, you can break compositional rules for artistic effect, but you need to learn the rules and why they matter before you can do so effectively. the example you posted below doesn’t really make your case. it’s not that great of a photo, rotated or not. to intentionally rotate the horizon to give it an uncomfortable or disorienting feeling is fine if that’s the goal hell, maybe it’s more to feel otherworldly or any other number of things you can derive from it. the point is that you need a reason and intent behind the unlevel horizon. what feeling were you trying to invoke by not having the ground beneath the feet of the viewer?

more like how many animals eat then and get poisoned.

there’s a handful of general directions you could go with both camera and mic then.

you could get a mic that plugs directly into the camera, but then you’ll be tethered. to it. you can get a mic that plugs into a little recorder, but you’ll need to sync your audio. you can get a wireless mic with a receiver that plugs into the camera, but that starts to get expensive. or a number of different options that can run things however you want. the most affordable option to start and remain convenient in my mind is a mic and a cheap recorder.

something like a used one of these with a cheap lav mic could be a good option.

as for camera, there’s two main paths. you could go mirrorless and get something more like the canon you already had, or you could get an actual camcorder.

a mirrorless camera will give you the option of different lenses and will have a larger sensor. it will also allow you to shoot nice stills and give you room to grow. it will generally have a higher potential for better quality video in the long run, but will be harder to learn and use. I think you’d be well served by a micro 4/3rds camera. a used Panasonic gh4 can be had for around $300. that would be able to provide some fantastic quality for the price. it’ll also be able to use any m4/3 lenses out there. they have a standard mount used by all such cameras. Panasonic is generally the more video focused brand in the space. a larger sensor with give you shallower depth of field, but that’s not as necessary as many like to think you the kinds of content you’re looking to produce.

the camcorder will be a much more streamlined out of the box solution. if you want something that will just work and be versatile without needing to spend money on additional hardware and learn all the ins and outs this will be a better option. it will likely have a highly versatile zoom lens and should still shoot plenty high enough quality for some simple explainer videos. it’s the less popular option these days, but I will think it has its place. I’m less familiar with these but I’m sure you can find a reasonable one with a little shopping around.

what kind of budget are you thinking?