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arkhavens · 1 year

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had a loose idea for smthn that would fix like all of my issues w where swtors storyline is/has been going.

what if, instead of immediately getting queued for the prelude to kotfe, there was a quest placed right before it where you essentially chose if you want that toon to actually go through the kotfe/kotet expansions, OR to play through the 5 years that the alliance commander is in carbonite?

bc for 1- i really want details on that period, and 2-it seems like Such a fucking lazy cop out to just mention that "oh yeah lol all the class characters just disappear for some reason right when the alliance commander does and their respective govts are fine w that" and act like that Makes Any SENSE.

it would give bioware a chance to actually diversify the story again, it would give players that dont want to lose their companions a way to still continue the story, we could get actual development into why the hell malgus is even alive, it would make the republic and empire being even remotely functional make sense(bc while i could understand the smuggler+bounty hunter dropping off the map, you cannot fucking tell me that the republic losing the Barsen'thor, the Hero of Tython,+Havoc Squad's leader, AND the empire losing the Empire's Wrath, multiple major members of the dark council,+Cipher 9, ALONGSIDE anyone Else that was lost in the fighting, would just be fine.)

and like it wouldnt even need to be a complete chronicle of the 5 years!! we've had major timeskips in game b4, so it could definitely speed past some shit. but just seeing how the empire and republic even managed to hold it together at ALL would be fascinating.

i honestly feel like setting up a sort of branch out -> joining point -> branch out again -> rejoin etc pattern to content could work really well if done properly. it would weave the overarching story together but allow for a lot of diversity in playthroughs, which is what ive seen practically Everyone complaining about.

idk. just, more class content. the little class missions on rishi engaged me more than the entirety of kotfe+kotet, and im saying that as someone who actually kind of enjoyed those expansions the first go around

#i desperately want to explore the fucking opticron droids and the weird fucking machines that the SI uses #like they just drop that shit on you and NEVER BRING IT UP AGAIN #it kinda feels like the interesting writers escaped containment or something for those quests lol #i did kotfe and onward as my SI for the hilarity factor bc the concept of valkorion having to share a 'room' with 6 other ghosts was funny #and the idea of literally anyone looking at him and going #'' yeah that guy looks like he would be at all a reasonable and/or sane choice for alliance commander! ''#is fucking absurd and entertained me while i was sligging thru the content #swtor #shit how do i tag this?#uhhhhhh #you know what fuck it #my posts

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rebelband · 1 year

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cks was making a cameo in my dream and then my alarm woke me up, so. well. okay.

#[art]#[2023]#cks #specifically it was just two still images of them but it was at the very end #had my silly outfit and all its piercings... plus ones I never gave them before? odd.#so I wanted to entertain the ''actors au'' idea but in all honesty they wouldn't make it much beyond a bonus background actor or dancer #(for musicals); they'd forget their lines so often it'd just be a hassle #usually casted as goons/minions/characters that follow someone of authority/in power #height helps; unintentional intimidation factor at times...#pretty unknown! like the rest. except cpn who's well-known for his looks (and acting to back it up)#something something... gestures. a scientist and their creation made of parts and through illegal means #of which someone (swt) is chasing said suspects down except it's hard to exactly realize [cks] is the creation in question at first #so it has that internal conflict as the film goes on of like. ough. aren't they [human] at this point? and ough. illegally made. but ough.#didn't ask to be made. trope of -> creation will not mind if it has to be dismantled and its creator would go through hell to Not let that #happen out of love and. anyways I'm not going to explain the synopsis of the actual plot they play (was kept kind of unknown due to failed #marketing) but i do think they should get to know each other behind the scenes #and something etcetera any homoerotic or romantic scenes they play together Stop being just acting but Oh g-d they cannot confess that.#they're just work colleagues...!! and then there's an ''i love you'' scene and it's all #this is getting too long. bye

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leatherbookmark · 7 months

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a thing i have JUST realized, isn't the human brain amazing lol -- is that we talk about izzy's thoughts and feelings on ed, on blackbeard, about how he serves one but not the other, etc, etc, and how it means he never loved or even respected the True Man Underneath It All but rather the bloodthirsty legend of a pirate--

e x c e p t izzy is not the first person who makes the distinction between edward and blackbeard. it's ed himself, when he says "actually, i want to be called edward from now on".

before, when he was with stede, it didn't bother him at all that the crew called him blackbeard. that was his name! he was blackbeard, what else would they call him. only stede and izzy got to "ed" or "edward" him, because they were closer -- stede was his first close friend, izzy was his friend and first mate for decades. (note that fang was with ed the longest, but he doesn't call him by his name! you gotta deserve it.)

izzy doesn't do anything inappropriate or out of proportion when he snaps at the crew to call him blackbeard or captain -- that's who ed is, is supposed to be, to them. they're not friends! they even call stede captain, and have you seen that guy?

it's ed that makes the connection between his current state: draped in fuchsia robes, singing sad songs about how sad he is, showing his vulnerable and emotional state in front of people who are supposed to respect and trust his authority. and by that he splendidly loses that authority, to the point that wee john calls him ed, and when izzy snaps at him for disrespecting his captain, ed goes no, actually, yknow what, do call me edward! and then he goes on to encourage the crew to sing as well and hey, actually, why are we being pirates! we should do a talent show!

the distinction is clear here. before all that, in izzy's eyes, his boss was blackbeard, captain, ed/edward -- different names for different occasions, but one and the same guy. but now? this guy singing songs in a pink bathrobe doesn't want to be called blackbeard, he's edward! ed time now! we're going to eat marmalade and express our feelings in front of everyone! and hold talent shows! Ya Hoo !

yeah, it's no wonder izzy doesn't want that. he wants his competent captain back, and this current dude, edward? he's not him. so, uh,

#shrimp thoughts #AND it's not izzy that's the final nail to magenta ed's coffin. it's the lads calling for EDDIE to come and sing for them again #right after izzy -- his first mate! the guy who followed him for all those decades with only mild complaining and an occasional #fed up tirade here and there -- tells him he has no reason to respect him the way he is now. if that's the way with izzy -- then fuck!#what about these guys? those basically strangers to whom he stupidly bared his soul? who are treating him like a source of entertainment?#man's just lost izzy's support. he doesn't have stede (the guy who has the sort-of loyalty of the crew). and the crew respects and admires #blackbeard -- but ed? eddie? uh oh.#look at his face and body language before and after the 'hey eddie give us another song!'. before: he's clearly upset by what just happened #but he starts to fix the robe on himself. starts trying to deal with it and stuff. but the second he hears that one sentence? he freezes.#he turns his head towards the source of the voices -- the crew chanting his name -- very slowly. his eyes are barely moving #this is not to say that izzy's words had no effect on him because they clearly did! but he did not go full kraken to make a point that izzy #is wrong and actually pink and karaoke are good. he goes kraken because attack is the best defense. and it's so fun when #everyone laughs at your jokes and claps when you sing! it's just that people are fickle as fuck :/#tl;dr the bekrakening is a complex process that doesn't have its source in one grumpy first mate who just wanted everyone to do their jobs #but rather in a fuckton of factors from which one was -- yeah -- stede abandoning ed after he bared his feelings to him. leaving him a #confused raw wound. which would be fine if ed was a teenager but unfortunately he's a scary pirate who loves a good maim #this post is soooooooo long oh my god i could have fit it in three short paragraphs probably

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poptartmochi · 9 months

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however.. it's not just blorbo thoughts that haunt me with that song... it's teacher thoughts too! 🤯

#for the past few months I've been going back and forth about whether i want to teach middle or high school #and this is nowhere near a deciding factor #BUT... consider the following with me.. performing one version as a mass piece at the beginning of the year with the full choir and then.#🤌🏻#at the end of the year doing the other with just the seniors because they have become the old man who will never again pass this way 😭#i feel like dickau's would be better as a mass piece because of it's more relaxed rhythms. the chords sound fuller than macdonald's which #would probably sound nicer with all hands on deck! and then macdonald's more rhythmically challenging arrangement would be cool for the #seniors 😁 but this is to my untrained and pretty rusty ear so 🕴️ we'll see how i feel when i go back to school #another idea I've entertained is giving each class a like. Challenge Song their freshman year and recording it‚ then reprising it their #senior year and letting them compare their performances to reflect their growth as musicians.. i think that would be really cool :]#i dont think i could conduct the bridge builder with that in mind though.. id start crying lol! but i think it is fundamental as a choir #student to watch your director cry in the middle of a song+ continue on as if nothing was happening #but anyhow idk man.. the idea of working with high schoolers to really build up their musicality and prepare them for the world is very #appealing to me but you can't be a musician without the foundations which i could establish in middle school #and foundations are very fun to teach as well!! but foundations can be taught in a beginning choir course or during summer camp #so 😩#the music i want to direct is all satb which suits high school better. but is it selfish to choose which way to go based on what music you #like? 🕴️🕴️ the contemplations man.... anyhow i have a lot more growing and learning and Studying to do before this will even matter #can't prepare kids for the world when I've scarcely explored it myself!#sriracha.txt

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indecisive-v · 2 years

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gosh heckin darnit i turned my saoif protag and partner into their own characters heckin frick

#these two are roleplayers #and i like to think they grinded for the sole purpose of just holding up their rp characters as being tough and powerful #also i am Trying to separate chiara from koharu but the game just won't help me on that #on another note they like roleplaying really common shitass story tropes #and they try to lean so far into it that it makes the rp stories they create actually enjoyable and funny #their rp premise in sao was just 'good girl x bad boy' high fantasy edition #but oops! they are stuck and now this is their Actual Life!#they Do act normal around other top players (unless they feel like being Silly)#but they often entertain the fantasy for any children trapped in the game #just imagine them like abridged godfrey except they're so dedicated to the tough knight and powerful demon bit that-#-they grinded to the near top of the assault team and are now genuinely important players #anyways here's the actual tags now #nath's art #saoif #sao integral factor #sword art online integral factor #doodles #also the chiara doodle was drawn on a whiteboard

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releaseholiday · 2 years

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You are honestly to god stupid Katty. No, Harry Styles is not promoting a brand like his own if he doesn't own it. It's stupid as fuck and Harry is not stupid. Period.

#thank you for this evening’s entertainment💋#@ dwd anon mhmm i don’t agree with everything you said but yeah it just shows that all of Harry’s fans - larries and harries - are fed up #I mean I think a huge factor in why the movie isn’t doing well was 100% the marketing #it turned not only the gp off but even fans like they were so stupid idk what they were thinking #and yeah I agree that people are loosing interest in Harry #mostly bc of the drama and people jumping on the hate train #harries are tired of defending him #most of them became fans when he was loved by everyone and it was cool #now it’s like 🥴 and they don’t like it #they’re getting the larrie treatment aldksh #@ hl anon yeah I 100% agree #I think we should just not put them on a pedestal #they’ve been in this industry for 12 years #it’s almost impossible to come out of it unaffected after everything #I still have hope they’ll wake up and make the right decisions tho🥲

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morganaspendragonss · 2 years

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the way they're reporting on the tory leadership contest is like some kind of talent show 'tom tugendhat knocked out of race, remaining four go through to next stage' this isn't x factor mate

#it's more entertaining that x factor for one thing #no i'm joking #but fr why do they use headlines like this 💀#uk politics #shut up holly

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months

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“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #playstation #sony #copyright #copyfight #drm #monopoly #enshittification #batgirl #road runner #financiazation #the end of ownership #ip

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dapperrokyuu · 7 months

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My fatal flaw is that Ill gravitate towards crime/detective shows even tho I know from experience theyll either be dramatized garbage or played straight predictable.

#dee p thoughts #its either this wouldnt ever happen and/or this person would never exist but we'll play it up for the entertainment factor #or like we'll be normal but also wont try at all to make this a mystery or an interesting one. but this is partly because Ive consumed so #much imo. and is why I was pleasantly surprised by the oxygen deficient water in the first episode of ron I literally have never heard of #that before. like I know its the appeal of sherlock and why detective shoes allude to it but the schtick of the detective having a #conclusion about someone they just met and then naming off random crap that lead to it gets old after youve seen it all that time ajldkfadl #and also frankly I assume detectives dont do that anymore. but at this rate the genre is divorced from reality I Get It

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erb23 · 9 months

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If nothing else, I think more movies should definitely commit to bigger press tours because I can not be making plans to go see something if I only become aware of it the week of release.

#really. there's a lot of good things that come out and by the time I know I've already made other plans for other things that have taken up #all of my cash. you think after all the whittling down of options between other movies concerts and other forms of entertainment that I can #factor your stuff in? I do not have the disposable income for that dear #anyhow my Barbara drink floatie coasters look so nice and I got them because they had the decency to let me know before the absolute last #minute about both the movie and the tie in merch. and my biggest regret of the year was thinking I could get SV stuff on a sale because tha #too was a certified summer hit and like I have to hope for a rerelease of Mr. Punk (or like a really banging import which'll scramble my #plans so fricking bad) You see why I can't and won't be watching every film that don't advertise itself sooner rather than later

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lith-myathar · 10 months

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#god DAMN it #how do i turn off my stupid thing that i do where if i can sense that a guy likes me i just #can't help but play into it a bit?? even if i don't like them back that way #i think it's because the chase/crush phase of anything is entertaining and i am easily bored #it feels like a game and that's fun even if it's not serious #the problem is it's so easy to interpret the excitement of having fun as attraction or romantic interest when it actually isn't #and then you have this mess of being tangled up with someone and realizing you don't want them and you're going to have to hurt them #and you don't know why you can't just BE NORMAL ugh #i also think i project this sort of mysterious vulnerable sad girl vibe that makes certain guys want to take care of me #and my entire being physically rejects that even though a part of me does want to be taken care of rather desperately #basically i think im very much one of those women men later describe as having been crazy or screwed up #cause im constantly getting conflicting feedback from my mind and body and as a result i give very mixed signals #ive never tried but im relatively certain i would also do this with women because even though the baseline fear is absent #the general anxiety and dread i have around vulnerability would still be a big factor #anyway i would just really like to be able to like somebody without constantly questioning if it's real and not feeling physically sick 24/#🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃#tbh i think part of it is just that as far as my nervous system is concerned #sex is dangerous and so is anyone who might want it from me

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rebeccathenaturalist · 5 months

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Welcome to my Tuesday morning PSA about plastics!

So--I was walking along the Bolstadt beach approach sidewalk here in Long Beach, WA yesterday afternoon, and I started seeing these little orange pellets on the ground that looked a little bit like salmon roe (but probably weren't). So I picked one up, and it was most definitely rubber. I went around picking up every one I could find, and while I didn't keep exact count I probably amassed 50-60 of them. I took this picture before depositing them in the nearest trash can.

These are airsoft gun pellets, and you can buy them in big jars containing thousands of them. That means that someone who decided that the beach was a great place to shoot their airsoft guns could easily litter the place with countless little bits of plastic rubber in less than an hour. We already have a huge problem here with people leaving trash, including tiny bits of plastic, all over the beach (you should see the gigantic mess after 4th of July fireworks when thousands of people come in from out of town, blow things up, and then leave again without picking up after themselves.)

But these airsoft pellets have a particularly nasty side effect. You know how my first thought was "wow, those look kind of like salmon roe?" Well, we have a number of opportunistic omnivore birds like crows, ravens, and several species of gull that commonly scavenge on the beach, especially along the approaches because people often feed them there. If I can catch the resemblance of an orange airsoft pellet to a fish egg, then chances are there are wildlife that will assume they're edible.

Since birds don't chew their food, they probably won't notice that the taste or texture is wrong--it'll just go down the hatch. And since they can't digest the pellets, there's a good chance they might just build up in the bird's digestive system, especially if the bird eats a large number of them--say, fifty or sixty of them dropped on the ground along the same fifty foot stretch of sidewalk. The bird might die of starvation if there's not enough capacity for food in their stomach--or they might just die painfully of an impacted gut, and no way to get help for it. If the pellets end up washed into the ocean, you get the same issue with fish and other marine wildlife eating them, and then of course the pellets eventually breaking up into microplastic particles.

You can get biodegradable airsoft pellets; they appear to mainly be gray or white in color rather than bright screaming orange and green. But "biodegradable" doesn't mean "instantly dissolves the next time it rains." An Amazon listing for Aim Green biodegradable airsoft pellets advertise them as "Our biodegradable BBs are engineered to degrade only with long-term exposure to water and sun and will degrade 180 days after being used." That's half a year for them to be eaten by wildlife.

I don't know, y'all. That handful of carelessly dropped rubber pellets just encapsulates how much people don't factor in the rest of nature when making decisions, even on something that is purely for entertainment like an airsoft gun. We could have had a lot of the same technological advances we have today, but with much less environmental impact, if we had considered the long-term effects on both other people and other living beings, as well as our habitats. We could have found ways from the beginning to make these things in ways that benefited us but also mitigated any harm as much as possible. Instead we're now having to reverse-engineer things we've been using for decades, and sometimes--like the "biodegradable" airsoft pellets--they still have a significant negative impact.

But--at least there are people trying to do things better, thinking ahead instead of just on immediate profit. We're stuck in a heck of a mess here, figuratively and literally, and changing an entire system can't be done in a day. Maybe we can at least keep pushing for a cultural shift that emphasizes planning far into the future--if not the often-cited "seven generations ahead", then at least throughout the potential lifespan of a given product.

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