@Apportal
I took photos and record some moments during playing ACNH. 🤭
Whenever i found something funny or possibly hilarious, i took some screenshots and turned them into meme or gave them some comments.
@Apportal
Oh, yes.
I drew them by pencil then i took photo of them and transfered to my computer to be edited with CorelDraw and Corel Photopaint. I drew them with vector shapes on Corel Draw then i arranged them with Corel Photopaint.
I have calendar 2021 projects and they are Ice Skate Boxers and Avian Kickboxers.
They are still in progress.
My current avatar, Shawn the skunk was based on Kicks' head model.
@Apportal
Um... 1 year to finish 24 different characters.
I submitted my drawings annually every January on Deviantart.
My calendar 2020 projects were very terrible late, blame to my slacks during year 2019.
This year i have designed my characters earlier to avoid panic hours like Home Alone panic time.
For my 2021 projects, i will create 12 Ice Skate Boxers and 12 Avian Kickboxers.
The Avian Kickboxers are 12 different Anthro birds with kickboxer outfits. They can fly so i will announce their official sport name later.
Btw, this is one example my Avian Kickboxer by hand drawing + some computer edit.
@Heavyarms55 Yeah, post-truth politics continues to be fueled. And it's fueled by deregulated money in politics. But i don't know if there are enough people that can recognize it. And, yeah, US cars are excessively sized compared to the rest of the world, and use much more energy & carbon. I think the Japanese K car size was made to fit on older tight streets. Whereas the us built its town's around the bigger-is-better cars. There needs to be real consideration to population size. There's not enough land & resources if the current population all wants suburban homes, cars, beef. I think japan respects sustainability because they are an island country, granted, a large one.
I said it before, but i envy the respect and unity of japanese culture. And their respect for public service. This is why I will vote.
@Heavyarms55 That must suck. Best advice is to do what you personally think is the right choice. If you want to go back, go back I'd say. I imagine any decent family will understand that.
Regarding the infrastructure. I live in the Netherlands, and I think it's quite comparable to Japan in the sense that it's relatively small for its population; has great public transport, etc. I've recently subscribed to a Canadian YouTuber living in Amsterdam (Not Just Bikes). The channel is all about comparing various aspects of travel, urban planning, street design and (public) transport between The Netherlands and Canada and the US. I've never realised how different the two countries really are. Just the idea of being tied to a car to travel to the supermarket sounds awful to me, how everything is a 15-20 minute ride. Supermarkets look like giant tool warehouses, buying in bulk to avoid having to ride there too often, and turning your own house into a miniature warehouse. I'm so glad I have three or four supermarkets within walking distance, or within a 3 minute bike ride. I've also heard that one of the reasons for this is that certain regulations make it impossible for stores to open up in residential areas for example (don't know if it's true, but that would make a lot of sense).
@Wavey84 Yeah, something has been really lost in the world. Things that matter don't matter, everything is throw-away, and humans have no intrinsic value, they're just a number on a page of metrics as compared against all the other metrics and the machine standard. "Life" was lost some time ago, and we got put on this weird hamster wheel. Though i remember when TV was just 6 inglorious channels plus PBS. ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, And whatever unaffiliated networks were the other two UHF channels at the time, and PBS. That was it. that was television. Take it or leave it. I didn't really understand the appeal of cable when it popped up in the 80's, and I don't really understand it or youtube still. I subscribe periodically to youtubeTV (cable) mostly to get specific shows, which is ironically just the stuff on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, whatever those other unaffiliated networks are going by today, and PBS. And really only seasonal/event stuff. I've never been much of a TV person (but there was "that one video that aired at 3:00AM that night on PBS that I spent 30 years looking for again and never found." You don't get that anymore.....it goes viral and is everywhere so it's therefore nowhere.
I even miss payphones. they were gross, yes, but they were a way of life that involved actually scheduling things and coordinating things with other people. The tech was worse but the act of operating with the tech was human, and civil. Versus the cellphone era. Instead of coordinating with people, the least civil ones dictate the flow of society - they do everything whenever it's convenient for them-self, and expects everyone else to be available and jump for them. Technology didn't make life easier. It made life easier for the kind of people that used to be pushed to the bottom, and floated them to the top.
@ThanosRexx I could write too many text walls on the above, sadly. It's not an aging stereotype that "things were better then" - and I'm convinced it never has been, now. Things actually always are getting worse. Humans have a way of continually making things worse, and in the west we have an obsession with handing the keys to the "youth" and effectively letting kids run the society - so naturally it always gets run further into the ground with each generation until we end up self-immolating and start all over again. I think I understand the western cycle of history now.
I'm reading all your "revealations" here and I'm thinking....have you not actually read a single text wall I've posted in the past several years in this very thread?
I have mostly agreement and a few disagreements side views to yours. Mostly agreement all the way across.
"Affordable apartments" is an odd subject though. The entire American way of life has been the "suburban house" for a long long time. And that didn't used to be unaffordable. Not building microapartments isn't what went wrong. You shouldn't actually want one - that's not what used to be the cultural desirable norm. It's the fact that actual ho uses that used to cost less than what a car now costs now costs over a quarer million. THAT is what went wrong. OLD America meant you could buy that 2 bedroom house for less money than a modern Jeep Wrangler, and actually OWN it for life - not this new world where it takes 3 incomes to own a house. Desiring cheap apartments is asking for a bandaid while the sores fester uncontrollably. And when they do build them all they do is urbanize and gridlock the area by densifying, calling it better, and the apartments are still more than half anyone's income. It gets worse for the people that scraped by before and doesn't really help the people that didn't.
Agreed otherwise on nearly all the rest, of course, though, as I've been ranting about for YEARS right here.
And I do agree. Maybe it's 5 years. Maybe it's the past 10 years. I can't tell. But this is absolutely a different society than it was 10 years ago. I thought it was just regional on the East Coast, but apparently it's worse than I thoguht and is everywhere, even in the boonies. Unless you're just in an area where all the New Yawkers went....which seems to be "everywhere" and if so, yeah....I feel that pain. But the society today is absolutely not the same one it was in 2010.....I never even left here and I feel like a foreigner completely. It changed all around me while I didn't, to the point that I don't feel like a citizen, I'm just a foreigner getting by.... Without having ever left. And it's the worst imaginable feeling - imagine if you left your country and it got nuked, occupied, and is entirely gone and erased from maps while you were gone? That's how I feel - my actual culture no longer exists. It's on maps, but it doesn't exist there anymore. I don't know what exactly happened to it either. But one day it was just gone, and I didn't see it happen. Maybe it started around 2000.....maybe it was cell phones that did it. It seems to conincide...
The only caveat I'll give "everyone else" is people not saying hello and looking strangely...I mean you do realize there's a plague going on? I'd flip you off if you tried to say hello right now, too....that's respiratory droplets that didn't need to be shared, after all...
American humor always sucked, though. It's gotten progressively worse. But it was never good. At least not since Bob Hope and Henney Youngman died. That one's just repatriating.
FWIW, though, no, you're not ever going to feel comfortable here. You have the same problem I do, and it has nothing to do with having been in Japan. You're one person - you went one way based on how you were raised, and society around you here went another. You can either somehow convince yourself to become just like them, or you'll always be an outsider and nothing more. And a decade ago, that wasn't the case. "Welcome back." Worse, I tend to say I'm "culturally Japanese" despite not being ethnically Japanese or having ever been to Japan. It's kind of a misnomer, of course, but the idea of the "politeness culture" is precisely how I was raised...in that regard I was raised for Japan's society, accidentally. Unfortunately, apparently, none of the West is like that. "Bad parenting". We should have been raised to be hoodlums.
@WoomyNNYes The flip side of that is population needs to be managed around the way of life. The US way of life involved the home the beef, whatever. To allow exponential population growth to the point that's seen as unsustainable then requires people to "vote" to steamroll over the way of life people that were already there lived. It effectively means the new, younger, larger population declares war to end the way of life of the rest, either by pricing it out and making life harder and harder and harder, or by actively regulating it out (or manipulating it.) Which is probably a big part of why the politics is where it is. You have a whole faction declaring that an entire other faction's way of life, that was always the way of life, now has to end.....to accommodate them. Sounds like the Spanish Inquisition in reverse....so people will fight tooth and nail AGAINST them - rather than promoting any given cause of their own. They're perpetually on the defensive against invasion more or less. And they aren't wrong. There's no escape from a mess that needed to be quelled in the 60's, not now.
@Octane Not Canada, but for the US, yeah. Now where I am we have a few normal supermarkets...within a 10 minute drive...which is rare. And they're more conventional than the tool warehouse ones. But that's still too far, with traffic. I do have one very close one but due to the layout it still isn't a 3 minute bike ride, even though I can see it from here (and you can't really keep going there. You house does have to be a mini warehouse, and at this point I couldn't imagine living any other way. Especially post-covid I'm just used to a 3 month stockpile of food now. Anything else is unimaginable.
But it's not just regulations that keep stores from opening in residental areas. Most of it is cost. They keep re-zoning commercial space to be residential because commercial never moves in. Retail is dead. Online replaced it. It's seen as a liability. And the cost of real estate in any populated area is so astronomical no business could really survive except the ones making 500% profit. So nearby all you get is highly expensive luxury things, small boutiques things like that. Any real shopping is at the big cheap-land shopping districst.....and that is a MINIMUM of a 30 minute ride each way by car. It's best avoided....so you just replace it with more online. And before you know it, there's no need for shopping stores, because everything is done online. But the alternative is a 1 hour travel time by car just to buy a plastic cooler you could have bought on Amazon. And that's if you don't get stuck in traffic. And you WILL get stuck in traffic. So 1-2 hours to buy that one item you want, or just click on Amazon and get it in a day or two. How COULD retail survive? All because retail left the areas where people actually are and make you go to THEM instead. Walmart started it. They bought super cheap land in the middle of nowhere in rural america and forced everyone to them in open country with cheap prices. By the time they were done, no one was left, and you HAD to go to them. And then the other stores built around them.
@NEStalgia I don't think it's inevitable. It works over here, so I don't see why I can't work in the US or any other place for that matter. I'm certain it requires a lot of structural changes. By the sounds of it you're essentially giving up the free market for giant mega-conglomerates to dominate the online retail industry, and what's left of the actual retail industry. But hey, being stuck inside a car in traffic means freedom, right? And the rest is communism, so let's create also this system where only a handful of companies rule and dictate the country. Sounds lovely
And don't get me wrong, it's happening over here as well. Amazon opened their online store here earlier this year, and they've been trying to crush the competition with incredibly low (and unfair) prices. But I have some hope left that the smaller shops can endure this. But really that's another global problem we're facing, and not too many people are bothered by it it seems. Anyway, it's another topic entirely.
On my way home from work, or uni, I stop at the greengrocer, the supermarket, and sometimes the butcher. I do it all on my bike, and it probably takes less than 20 minutes, the ride included (which is about a 3km ride). I can't imagine it any other way really. Shops are allows to open up anywhere AFAIK. It probably requires a request at the municipal level, and you have to be registered at the chamber of commerce, but it's possible. Anyway, I rarely buy groceries for more than a day or two in advance as a result. And it works, because you also don't need a ton of space to stockpile all the extra food. And most of the vegetables are fresh every day.
@Apportal Ha, Yeah, we’re both relatively new, but I think I’ve managed to gather that the thread won’t die anytime soon.
@Anti-Matter OMG, you read my mind. I always am mad at this for having sandwiches. I don’t even know if it’s possible to have sandwiches when your a player, and it annoys me so much. You’re drawings are wonderful. I always thought you did them completely on a website, I didn’t know you draw them IRL. I’m not too good at drawing. I’m better at piano.
Wanna know if a user is old?
Ask If they know who’s Chicken Brutus, James Newton, or The Black Dragon.
@Eel I know The Black Dragon, Chicken Brutus rings a bell and I know nothing of a James Newton. You see, I have a habit of reading old, locked or dead threads, so I know lot’s of the old users.
Heigh Ho Heigh Ho. It’s off to work (from home) I go.
@MarioLover92 I still remember the day Resetti appeared for the first time. Cool, I haven't played too many Mario Party games, before that it was Mario Party 4. Funny how Super Mario Party and New Horizons ended up being the first time playing new entries since GameCube entries. I haven't tried the main mode to Super Mario Party, I just been having fun in mini-game mode.
Nice to see someone else enjoy the Riders series, I also did like Zero Gravity as well. I haven't played Free Riders because I don't own an Xbox 360, in fact I played Sonic Generations on PC being a PC gamer too.
The resident Trolls superfan! Saw Trolls Band Together via early access and absolutely loved it!
Yeah, politics have definitely become insufferable over the past few years. My father & brother are on opposite sides of the spectrum, to the point that the remote control has been flung once or twice during the arguments.
Also, the fact that protecting yourself from a pandemic (by wearing a mask) is somehow seen as a political statement over here does my head in. My father thinks it's going to "magically disappear" after election day (he doesn't think it's a hoax per se, but believes the media is overplaying it to "make Trump look bad"), and my family is going to try and hold a wedding this weekend with no safety rules in place, inviting 300 people to a Church that already feels full with just 50 (I have to go to, otherwise I'll be seen as rude or disrespectful).
Currently Playing:
Switch - Blade Strangers
PS4 - Kingdom Hearts III, Tetris Effect (VR)
@Octane The physical structure here was unfortunately (and forcibly) designed in a way that doesn't facilitate improving it without tearing it all down. And don't get me wrong, absolutely nobody on earth despises cars any more than I do. I'm the one that said I won't be happy until every last car is melted to slag. They can't be gone soon enough and I will be thoroughly miserable until the day the very last one is gone.
So I'm not defending it. I'm at war with it. I'm just not seeing an real route to fixing it without obliterating everything and staring from 0. And then that presents hosts of other problems.
And retail is already dead here. It was on life support before covid. Now it's just vanishing in real-time. The problem we have isn't that "Amazon is crushing small retail." In fact Amazon only accounts for, like 10% of all retail still. the problem is that 15, 20 years before Amazon even existed, Walmart, followed by a few others already crushed normal retail and created a mega-corporate socialist economy to replace the free market. We already lost retail from race to the bottom pricing via Walmart. Amazon just took Walmart's own strategy, managed to shave a few more pennies off via logistics advantages, and used it against them. There really wasn't anyone else left in the battle by then. There wasn't much of normal retail left by the time Amazon arrived. Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond, Best Buy, Target, and a handful of others killed retail and built a mega-corporate National Store system. Every town has the same shopping centers with the same stores, most of which are owned by the same few companies. And all of those are an hour away, round trip from almost anyone. Heck it takes 10 minutes just navigating the parking lot in and out, so that's 20 minutes round trip even once you get there. Amazon only arrived to then wage war against Walmart and friends for supremacy. Technically Walmart still accounts for more retail than Amazon here. Significantly more....Amazon's the underdog in the US, comparatively!
I certainly don't even go those places any more. It used to be at least somewhat fun to "get out" from time to time. But then they overbuilt the whole area (another 500+ new homes! Coming soon 250 luxury apartments! Next to the other 300! 250,000 sq foot office complex! Next to the 10 others! All at the same intersection that already took 12 minutes to get through on a good day!
And for the love of anything holy never ever try to shop on a shore day! We're not that close to the shore here, but of course on a Friday everybody's heading that direction to the shores. I made the mistake last year of trying to go to the one shopping center for one restaurant for a birthday on a Friday afternoon. it took an HOUR AND FIFTEEN MINUTES in total gridlock just to get there. Then another half hour back. Almost 2 hours of travel time to get to the freaking shopping center and back home. And it was 93 degrees.. ...
So I don't leave home. Ever except special events and work. Other than grocery shopping, covid life is identical to normal life..... There's no point. Why go anywhere if the whole time is spent angry and frustrated in a car, and you're worn out by the time you get where you're going?
At least one nice thing about online shipping is we actually CAN buy from a ton of mom & pop and smaller companies....including through Amazon's "digital mall". In the physical realm you really can't do that. You have a choice between local upscale boutiques and paying 100x the price for anything, or driving an hour+ round trip just to go to Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond, Best Buy, Target, or the few clones. All the interesting stores closed 15, 20 years ago. And the few leftover mom and pop shops are long gone post covid.
I can't imagine the misery of buying groceries more than once a week. In summer I'd buy twice just because poultry would go bad and such if bought for a whole week...but here.....like I said I can literally see the supermarket (which is a VERY rare luxury in this country!) - but by the time you have to wind the road to get there. Wait at two perma-clogged intersections that are a minimum 7 minute wait each way, longer during busier times (which is about 4-6 hours a day....and usually when you want to go).....it takes about 15-20 minutes to get in there and park. Then do your shopping for however long that takes (the store itself is overcrowded and carts don't fit down the aisles with someone else's.....then waiting at checkout is a good 10 minute wait because they have 2 checkout lanes open and 20 people in line, and one needs a price check and another has a credit card problem), then another 15 minutes to travel like 1/2 mile home... A simple trip around the corner to the supermarket is a minimum 45 minute trip, and that's if it goes REALLY speedy. The same trip used to take like 15 min total 20 years ago. How can I not loathe anyone that's moved into the area in the past 20 years. Their very existence makes my daily life more miserable. To me, the area should have been capped at the population level that allowed a functioning daily life. After that, nobody else enters.
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