>>44777
It's really not and it isn't just because of the controls. Like I get that this was probably the first time lots of people were exposed to these ideas but it still felt like a kids game in certain weird ways while approaching very mature ideas, all of which I think helped it fill this niche at the turn of the century to where most people view it with a kind of nostalgia goggles. The overwhelming impression that I get is people specifically enjoyed it because they were under 20 when they first tried it. Like, probably 15 year olds.

I've already written at length here about than once about why I think Deus Ex sucks I think? but suffice it to say that the real problem hobbling it to me is the fact it's not that original and is basically just a 90s kitchen sink that came years too late and arrived just in time to seize on very obviously dated elements like The Matrix and The X Files and goth fashion just enough that probably it still gives people nostalgia, but that it was not remotely groundbreaking either for narrative outside the vidya medium at least nor especially for the mechanics.

Frankly the thing that I found most telling about everybody who raves how good it is is the fact that they try to say it was innovative but they never ever seem to bring up System Shock. Why? Because they were probably too young to have played it.

This has all made me realize that Eidos is basically a bunch of hacks who quite frankly just got really lucky and somehow popularized their game whereas the makers of things like Marathon and System Shock did not, most probably due in part to the fact that only a select small number of us even had access to gaming in the early to mid 90s and that by 2000 vidya while still being considered a "nerd" thing was already mainstreamed and popularized. But when you look at a game like System Shock and SS2 the whole argument that it was "innovative" completely falls apart. Having damaged limbs is in fact the sole defining thing I can even think of and many of the augmentations are not useful in fact I'm pretty sure I finished it with mostly just using heal. Almost all the other elements were pioneered instead by the System Shock games.

Having only beaten it in like 2017 or 18 or whenever it was I can say that I'm not impressed from a more objective standpoint. Bear it in mind that this is a year 2000 game. Most of the things one might be misled into believing are notable about it were already tried and common stock back then, for years in some instances including non-linear levels or puzzle solutions. I do not know why games often had a level with 3 stages though. VTMR's level structure was exactly the same in that regard.

I lastly think that the real reason people remember it aside from the more mature concepts (which is probably what people mean by innovative because back then with a few very notable exceptions like Starcraft, Fallout, Planescape etc most games were incredibly banal and childish in their stories if stories even existed at all, with Jedi Academy and VTMR being two good examples) is the fact that JC Denton's voice acting was so poor that it crossed over to the other side of memorably comical. I'm pretty sure what they were going for is him being an unfeeling robot much like the cyborg lady whose name I forget atm but given his dialogue it became probably unintentionally hilarious. Like I'm pretty sure that for example when you fry that girl's father or you outright kill him yourself and the line goes

>that's a shame

that it was at least originally meant to convey his loss of humanity to cybernetics. I personally think that they bungled it and ended up trying to play it all for laughs, which is the main thing people end up remembering it for I have no idea why so many games insist on giving NPCs good voice actors but making the PC flat, dry, and sometimes just bad it's like a half measure between fully voiced player and silent player character.

I think that part of the reason I am especially so harsh on the game is not just because I genuinely didn't enjoy any of it nor was I impressed by the sporadic namedropping like a college freshman of a couple book titles etc. but because I can also take it in the context of Deus Ex HR, which unlike the first wasn't a bad game but which really exemplifies the ham fisted to downright idiotic handling of ideas from Eidos. What it helped emphasize to me was how thoroughly derivative and contrived a lot of things are and how much they really didn't have a lot of fresh ideas themselves. It made me feel like their studio was run by pretentious guys wearing OBEY caps when in HR I could see dozens of places where they really couldve dealt with things like identity, class, moral relativism, the mind, state power, the list goes on and on except at least HR was fun to play.

>>44980
Well I'm heatin mah harbl for one thing. I do know that part of it is because of not knowing how to look properly but I semi-frequently counter situations where I cannot for the life of me find those not even really old memes. I also fairly less frequently but still regularly enough encounter situations where I can't find some kind of game, old movie, or other type of media on TPB. The network itself might be strong but the number of failed nodes both hardware and wetware is constantly increasing. Good example with the cells btw mate but you actually also just pointed out that problem at a biological level: aging.

Like the problem of corrupted biological data can often become so extreme that you wind up with stuff like cancers multiplying unchecked and faulty or failing hardware throughout your subsystems. While this might work in the grand scheme of things somehow, at the purely data level it is also clearly suboptimal. The idea that no good traits ever become lost forever is a clearly patently false one that shows the fragility of organic data storage systems as well. To be clear, at this point I'm beginning to touch on the astrophysical concept of "information." I saw a pretty neat video on how one could theoretically use the surface of a Singularity to store nearly infinite data but I forget now pretty sure it was kurzgesasgt.

Anyway our only real backstop against all that is those lonely few intrepid autists who do things like work in archival and try to save that aging stuff like this guy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiLlNzxDfAg
It isn't even that old. I have half a mind to actually unearth a couple of old Zip drives I pilfered from I don't remember where and integrate them with 5.25 floppies and those really noice much new 1.44mb rainbow floppies which had that infinitely satisfying spring mechanism. Do you remember mouse balls? They got filthy but they were not that bad to clean. Yes I want to somehow integrate all of those data storage systems into some kind of a frankenbuild one day. I even got a bluray burner with M disc which I'm hoping wont blow up along with a 5.25 mounted card reader like this thing but cheaper
https://www.newegg.com/p/0DS-00DC-00001?item=9SIACJF5528905&nspcid=35069&nspgid=35070
And honestly at least one of those slots is actually still useful for SD cards which afaik are still pretty standard in video and other cameras including inside phones.

But all of that is completely irrelevant when the software you actually need to run it is long gone. Like what happens when you need to flash BIOS and fuck around with firmware and drivers that simply don't exist anymore? It will render the hardware effectively useless.

At the very least we should choose some kind of a general standard and stick with it. Like I can still actually use those two 8.4gb hard drives I have lying around with the appropriate adapter and power cable, but what does it matter when the very software to access and make sense of that data isn't around anymore and hasn't been for ten or twenty years?

This is literally an actual problem in rocket engineering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD0aLdRUs0

We have museums for a reason and it cuts both ways. Yeah some of them are just relics, and sometimes we end up with something that does the job better, but that still leaves whole generations mystified at how to produce something similar to say Greek fire. Ideally I think we should be aiming for more hardware and wetware network integration for preserving and advancing knowledge, that is fundamentally what separates us from the other animals ultimately that being the transmission of information.

There ia a recent NYT article about a government program which investigates unknown aerial phenomena, ostensibly to ensure they don't belong to foreign military. That seems simple enough, but the headlines are coming from a statement made by Eric Davis, an astrophysicist who assisted that program in identfying physical artifacts:

>No crash artifacts have been publicly produced for independent verification. Some retrieved objects, such as unusual metallic fragments, were later identified from laboratory studies as man-made.
>Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon U.F.O. program since 2007, said that, in some cases, examination of the materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves.”

No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-harry-reid-navy.html

Seems like a bombshell revelation, but Eric Davis has a long-held interest in UFO and paranormal research, which leads me to question whether his conclusions are biased, or the result of wishful thinking. An article from 2013:

Colleague Confirms NASA Affiliated Physicist Dr. Eric W. Davis’ UFO Research
http://undergroundresearchinitiative.blogspot.com/2013/05/colleague-confirms-nasa-affiliated.html

Davis mentions Skinwalker ranch, which is a paranormal hotspot. It's also the subject of a new History Channel show similar to Ancient Aliens. I've watched it, but wasn't impressed. I fall into the 'Want to Believe' category, but distrust any investigation-or information- which comes from the Pentagon. My suspicion is that they want to encourage UFO belief because it acts as a cover to conceal their own top secret capability. The 'Tic Tac' UFO video(filmed by a navy pilot) was intriguing, though. I don't know what to make of it, simply because I don't think we have that kind of propulsion yet. But see, that's the problem, maybe we do, but it's just Top Secret.

Oh, that government program mentioned in the NYT piece was begun by Harry Reid, and gave millions to one of his polical doners:

>Reid initiated the program, which ultimately spent more than $20 million, through an earmark after he was persuaded in part by aerospace titan and hotel chain founder Bob Bigelow
>Bigelow, whose company received some of the research contracts, was also a regular contributor to Reid’s reelection campaigns
>Bigelow has spoken openly in recent years about his views that extraterrestrial visitors frequently travel to Earth. He also purchased the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, the subject of intense interest among believers in UFOs.

The Pentagon’s Secret Search for UFOs
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/16/pentagon-ufo-search-harry-reid-216111

Skinwalker ranch again. Hm. It's like a paranormal research industry has been built up around a few key sites. This one feels too much like a tourist trap to me.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinwalker_Ranch

>>44845
There was a pretty ebin episode of Joe Rogan Experience recently that discussed this. It was a bit schizo but super entertaining.

>http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/george-knapp-jeremy-corbell

Also, the second pic in your post (from FLIR.mp4) is off of an ATFLIR pod. You can tell by the symbology and layout of the controls. It's a perfectly capable TGP, but it suffers the same limitations as anything using that technology. You see what it senses and nothing more. In this case, the screen says the following, it is tracking an IR signature. Most commonly spotting increased IR signatures caused by heat that pushes it above the background noise of solar IR radiation. So when in WHT (white hot, circled in red) mode what you are seeing is a large amount of IR-spectrum emissions. They don't form an identifiable shape but that is quite explainable with other information. Circled in green we have ownship altitude, in this case it's around Angels 20 in baro. In blue we have the pitch azimuth indicator, telling us that the point of interest is 6 degrees above point of origin, and in pink is the yaw azimuth, telling us the point is three degrees to starboard (right). So what we have is a large thermal signature being viewed from a point that's very close to directly behind it. That is prime positioning for seeing a lot of heat flare from jetwash.

Finally, accounting for the weirdness in the way the image behaves when swapping between TV and IR modes, that's a common thing in TGPs because the TV camera zooms further than the IR one does, so it's not the reading changing, but just the zoom level. Furthermore any movement that does happen will be amplified because the camera is in NAR mode (Narrow FOV) which means that from a camera setting of 1:1, it will close in on a bracketed section roughly the size of the yellow box and make that the full screen. The video also shows that this still is zoomed in on top of this FOV change so you're looking at a very distant target with tools not intended to show details, or in the case of TV mode, beyond its reasonable utility in that field. It makes sense that you'd get strange readings.

Tbh, out of the three, it's the least impressive and by far the easiest to make the plane argument for.

Have any Ernsts traveled to any countries in former Yugoslavia?

I'm interested in traveling there one of these days. Which place has the friendliest locals? Least friendly locals? What places are safest? Least safe? Places where English is spoken more?

What respective customs should I be aware of and adhere to?

What about attire? What countries judge you more harshly on appearances? When is formal wear usually expected? What attire is accepted for casual wear?

As much as I like sights, I'm not a particularly physical guy, so long hikes/walks are out of the question unless there's a designated tourist spot. That said, natural beauty is always an attraction for me.

I'm also interested in historic architecture and other sights of significance. Best places to visit?

I'm not a club guy, so dance clubs are also out for me. I will go to bars or music venues for local bands, though. Best places for local talent?

Dining is always for me. I've got no dietary restrictions apart from my aversion to seafood. Best cuisine?

Recommendations?