TELL ME
I’m a fake white supremacist on Facebook and have befriended thousands of Nazis. I report all their shitty racist posts and get their accounts banned, again and again and again.
When you remain as the last Nazi on Facebook, you can finally report yourself and then it will be all over.
This is a 21st century superhero story.
IDK how you can do it though… When I encounter shit like that it makes me like physically ill.
I think I’m so amused by the fact that I’ve totally fooled them and how fucking dumb they are that I get over the nausea. But not even kidding, one of the women told me her daughter killed her baby by putting meth in her bottle and I was able to correlate that, and I couldn’t read FB for days after.
You’re the hero we need. Thank you for your service.
PS: how much trouble are we in, out here in the non-nazi segment of the population?
Less trouble than you’d think. I wouldn’t call them a particularly organized group of people. Also I have convinced many of the American ones that voting for Biden will kick off race war and they’re super into that stupid idea.
Actually my self esteem increased this past few years but I won’t pass up an ADHD infodump opportunity. DDR is, IMO, the most efficient path for videogamer enthusiasts to transition to healthy exercise.
DanceDanceRevolution (DDR) is an arcade rhythm game that is certainly not dead, much to your surprise perhaps. The Japanese arcade scene is a whole, far more in depth iceberg to chip at, but trust me when I say Konami focusing on machines did not (only) mean pachinko machines, it also meant their multiple arcade rhythm games under the Bemani brand.
I am not kidding when I say there was a DDR setup in my middle school in southern USA. I started a bit there, but I never got real dedicated gameplay until there was a new DDR cabinet installed at both Dave and Busters and a local arcade joint. Having access to a machine can be substituted by a home pad. Please, buy the L-TEK pad without the bar. Cheapest exercise equipment out there at 250 + shipping from Poland.
You start off just browsing the songs in the roster until you find ones you like. There’s some token English licensed songs, but the bulk come from Konami original songs and a selection from the massive library that is the Rhythm Game Song Genre™. Most weebs get their beginnings from anime OPs and TouHou and Vocaloid, so if you have early YouTube nostalgia jump right into Bad Apple and Night of Nights. Later on you get addicted to the super high BPM (400+) techno mixes of the “Boss” songs (more on that later).
So how is gameplay? Visually, four lanes of arrows travel from the bottom to the top, indicating when you have to step and in what direction on the four directional pads at your feet. You should learn quickly that keeping your feet on the arrows and never stepping in the center is the key to actual gameplay. The song’s patterns are designed to lead one into another. It’s far from dancing, but you transition from paying attention to each arrow to just stepping to the beat. You internalize patterns and you get better, right?
But then, there’s a hurdle. Some songs demand you turn your hips and move your right foot on the left pad and vice versa. Difficulty is based on number 1 to 19, so you keep track that you can pass 11s, but not 12s. Each new song introduces new patterns in ordering and timing. Your old highest level becomes your warmups as you get better and better. You start to take a liking to faster, more complex rhythms like triplets, syncopated notes, and more sounds that a drummer doing prog rock would grok. One particular song has you galloping like a horse to Japanese festival music. If you know, you know.
But there’s a catch, a limitation: your own body. Nearing difficulty 12 and 13, you’re doing the equivalent of a decent jog for around two minutes, right? You might start needing some time between songs to take a break and drink some water. At 14 and 15, you’re going for something called High Intensity Interval Training. That is, you go at your MAXIMUM SPEED for as long as the song demands you go. You don’t give up because that means losing and you paid for this arcade game, right? You push and push and sometimes fall over, but eventually you’re running ragged at 600 steps per minute begging that your life bar doesn’t sink anymore. You need more training. The next song is 440 BPM with 880 steps per minute.
You want it. You want to play the harder songs in the difficulty ranking. You start to jog outside of the game on treadmills and otherwise. You put on the same heartrending songs and you find yourself sprinting desperately for 2 minute bursts because it’s impossible to stop while the song is playing. I’m running for almost an hour straight, and I get a head start at running progress because of my DDR experience! It pays off and you can play up to 15s, but there’s still 4 more levels until you get to 19. Over 4 years (at college, see?) I bike to the arcade, I play my heart out, I bike back. My blood pressure decreases, I breathe slower and deeper, and my snacking habits are at least counteracted. Best videogame of my life.
Only downside? I can’t convince anyone outside of the rhythm gamers at the arcade that the music is good. The rhythms of those “Boss” songs are etched into your soul by the end. I can namedrop MAX 300 and everyone in the scene can practically play the song out in their heads. It’s literally a lifestyle hobby, and a rather healthy one at that.
I used to play ddr when I was younger. Now I play MoonRider in VR(you may have heard of beat saber). I think it’s even more fun and harder exercise if that’s what you want. It’s also cheaper, you can get a quest 2 for $150 which can also do everything a stand-alone VR headset can do. There are actually a ton of exercise apps/games, though I’ve never tried any.
Is this an oculus exclusive? I can’t find it on Steam. Other than some 2d motorbike game.
I can actually attest to this and chime in with my own experience! When I was a senior in high school I was morbidly obese and had zero physical activity. My days consisted of binging junk food, getting high, and gaming. Buddy that I gamed with always played rhythm games with me, but on the controller. One day he got a dance pad. I enjoyed it so much I ended up losing 30lbs without even trying before I graduated. Just 30 minutes to an hour of DDR everyday. Started feeling good about myself again and went to the gym. Long story short here we are almost 20 years later and I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been and an active athlete in Strongman, Powerlifting, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So yeah DDR kinda saved my life lol
Once upon a time I used DDR to lose 30-40 pounds. I really enjoyed playing the game—even if I was never really great at it—and the side benefit is that I got into better shape.
But, that was a long time ago, in the PS1 era. Now—other than your L-TEK recommendation, which looks doable—I’m not even sure how I’d get back into it. Maybe worth my digging into again, seeing as how age has been putting on the pounds…
If you want any encouragement, one of the DDR regulars at the arcade was a totally non-college age woman who needed a hand brace due to some age-typical RSI, I presume. That is, I could only assume because she played up at the 13s (well near 9 footers and above) with dogged passion. I don’t even know how old she was because she had that cardio build, the kind you might find a Zumba enthusiast with. I’m not being ageist here: I’m more terrified of the 30, 35 year olds on the machines because I know their passion dictates their body and not the other way around. If you can’t take the high impacts on your joints for higher speeds, it’s always just fun to play the medium level charts and maybe even go for high scores. She didn’t need to go high and that was fine.
If you wanna get back into the grove, YouTube has all of the charts of the better songs available. Just… load up Captain Jack (Grandale Mix), AFRONOVA, Dynamite Rave. Get back in the groove without a pad and just feel it come back! Unfortunately official cabinets have lost the rights to many of the older classic songs, but StepMania doesn’t care :). And if you do pick it back up and wanna chase the new stuff, well, you’re gonna have to dance for that privilege.
I bought a used PS2, a new dance pad (the thick “cloth” one, not the nice metal one), two PS2 versions of DDR (DDR Max and Max 2 I think), and a memory card. It wasn’t cheap, but it got me back into it. When I was in highschool 20+ years ago I had the nice metal pad for PS2 and I loved it.
I use lemmy
Meshtastic long range radio systems. Off grid, user created, low bit rate but stupid long range.
Sweet I’m pretty inexperienced with radio stuff but I’ve been meaning to look into that for a while. Time to hop down the rabbit hole!
It’s just the right amount of DIY to be engaging and so cheap to get into. Plus the discord community is really active.
This is the first time I’ve heard about this; seems so cool! Any ideas which radios I should be looking at?
Cool. I got licensed just before the pandemic, I’ve played with APRS a bit but never LoRa
I placed my order for some radios to play with 3 days ago. Im unreasonably excited for them to arrive.
I’m in thr US and had to order mine from Aliexpress. Those were some long weeks of waiting.
How did you learn to not fuck up? I heard if you interfere with important radio frequencies (airplanes I think) you’ll get punished by the law.
Edit: I looked into transceivers at one point and saw that mentioned.
That’s fascinating. I just picked up my first 10M radio, can you elaborate a bit?
I’m not much of an expert but it’s basically low power UHF radios that use a particular waveform and FFT process to decode signals that are well below background noise. My radio regularly picks up messages with an SNR -10. I like it to the GPS system’s algorithms.
The main drawback is that, because they’re low power, you have to have LOS between antennas.
I work in Tech but I dislike most tech products. They are not repairable, are spyware, abandonware, shiteware and overall not a win-win situation that it is supposed to be. To be away from screens, I got into woodworking. To make things to old-fashioned way. To be repairable, to be sustainable and mostly to be imperfect. And yes, the imperfections are not on-purpose. I am doing my best to buy the old ‘Quality’ stuff that wont break and restore them to working order.
With shoes I buy second-hand Leather, Goodyear welted shoes and I splurged on Darntough socks. My feet are so happy. Currently I am seeking the best jeans, and almost all cotton seems to the trick.
So not the most niche per se, but I like it.
I used to prefer cotton and linen when I lived in the southwest, but now in the northeast its almost deadly. After the switchover to synthetics I realized how short the lifespan on natural fibers was. The Blaklader X1900 work pants I have use cotton ripstop as a base layer and it wouldn’t last more than 9 months without disintegrating, while the nylon parts looked brand new. Same with t-shirts, they’d start falling apart after 6 months or less sometimes. Probably the humid environment though.
Nice. I’m into computers and thinking about getting into woodworking too.
And agree with your clothing choices.
