Anneal

Yeah, I've been predicting this for a while now even since my home city closed down the vast majority of Toys R' Us. There's one in my neighborhood but it's virtually empty and on the verge of closing down as well. I have memories of going to Toys R' Us when I was much younger, but honestly, it's mostly their fault for failing to adapt to new demands. It's not only because they don't delve enough into the digital market, but they also fail to give out a good response to online competitors as well. Anything you can buy on Toys R' Us, you can always just buy on Amazon, sometimes for a lower price. And in some places, sometimes it's just easier to purchase stuff online rather than possibly drive 30 minutes to your nearest store.

I don't believe that's the case, we already have clear plans to go to Mars in a little more than a decade, and we already have private space companies like SpaceX who have their own fair share of achievements, like more reusable rockets and drone ships. And it's not like NASA has been doing nothing for the last few decades; we've been sending probes all across the solar system, and some like Dawn or New Horizons have given us far more insight and data than ever before. We don't do that many manned missions anymore besides trips to the ISS simply because it costs too much money for a limited amount of benefit – it means making the rockets bigger and adding life support, and there's an inherent risk. Plus, we've had a lot of advancement in this decade too. Smartphones are ubiquitous in the developed world, and microprocessing power has been growing exponentially; compare the Intel Core 2 Duo to the Intel Core i7-8700K. And everything is getting miniaturized; the only reason we haven't done so on smartphones or laptop is because we still want it to be usable. I'm pretty confident in a few decades we'll have nano-technology, so most sci-fi's aren't too far off. But I can understand where you're coming from. Politics has always lagged behind technology, and sometimes it gets in the way, but we certainly haven't been that stagnant recently.

Well, I've been doing it ever since I was in first grade, and now that I'm in university I'm forced to ride a bike to get anywhere. Try riding a bike with no hands.

General Technology: At the same time, however, automated labor would put millions and millions of people out of work and may just widen the gap between developing and developed countries as developing countries struggle to compete with robots. A lot of occupations would start "moving up" into the tertiary and quaternary sectors and education standards are increased (in some places a high school diploma is no longer enough to get a good occupation). Transportion might become automated as well. We already have cars that are almost self-driving in the market, and it's only going to take a few years before they become affordable (the Tesla Model 3 costs only $35K, affordable for upper-middle class families), or even completely self-driving (no driving wheel, no pedals, and you can tell your GPS where you want to go). We've already been ride-sharing and bike-sharing for a while too, so car-sharing might become much larger scale. In a generation or so, you'll no longer need to own a car to get anywhere. We still might cling onto natural gas for a bit, though renewable energy might take up a decent portion of overall energy use. Solar panels and wind turbines are already getting more efficient and next-generation nuclear plants are around the corner. We're already starting to ditch coal. Oil might take a while. I'm not that optimistic. We can mitigate some negative effects of climate change, but by that time we may already be hit by serious, adverse effects. Medicine: Not to mention some diseases like cystic fibrosis or ALD that can't be cured yet would still become vastly more survivable. Improved prosthetics genetic engineering doesn't sound far off either. The former is already supported and funded by many organizations and even the US government. We're getting closer and closer to having prosthetic limbs simulate real limbs. Also we might end up making technological improvements on food production. Vertical farms will become a reality, and we might end up having to rely on GMOs and cultured meat; eventually we can't waste water and resources on maintaining livestock and it'll become easier and possibly cheaper to just "grow" stem cells from animals. Speaking of which, stem cell therapy could improve as well. Politics and Economics: Kind of harder to talk about this since it's much more uncertain. We could get our first trillion-aire in a decade or two. Warfare is already pretty decentralized, but now that we're relying more on drones, guided weapons, and communications technology, manned aircraft could become obsolete. It's why I don't really believe in a WW3, which paints pictures of mass-scale warfare between two powers. I think that kind of warfare has already died out. Warfare today relies so much on information, and not always on having the biggest guns. Guaranteed income is another interesting idea. I don't really have an extreme optimistic view on the future, though if there's one thing I know, it's that humanity is pragmatic, so I don't have huge concerns.

Currently in university, hoping to sitting it through into graduate school. Pretty fortunate that my parents can afford it. I don't fully believe that you can gain as much knowledge as you do online than if you just went to university; sure, the Internet is an endless pool of information, but it takes a lot of studying, commitment, and instruction to actually understand it and use it practically. I'm currently going for a physics major. It's understandable if you can't afford or don't meet the requirements to get into certain universities, however, but community college is always an option. You can still choose to transfer to a larger university afterwards or just get an associate's degree.

Probably Arabic languages. Being Asian myself, Chinese is one of my first languages, and Japanese is somewhat easier to understand (part of its language is also based off the Chinese language, namely kanji letters). Korean is alphabetical like English, so if you take the time to learn it, it's probably not as hard as you think. I do understand that if someone is of European descent though, Germanic languages will roll far easier off the tongue than other languages, while Asian languages would be much more difficult.

Bernard's Dehydrated Water is just a joke. They've sold a bunch of dried foods in the past, but in the 60s they decided to make a gag product to sell to others. The vintage cans of "dehydrated water" are actually worth a fair bit now.

Companies and school districts are actually allowed to do that; for the former, it's more or less that you represent the company and they don't want you speaking against it outside of company grounds and that's a good way to enforce it (companies are very concerned of workers whistle-blowing and usually take measures to prevent it – that's why if you're laid off or decide to quit they usually give you months of salary money after you leave in return for a contract to keep you from talking negatively about them). They also like to see what kind of person you are behind curtains if you're writing a resume. Is that a good thing? Probably not, but they expect that if you willingly put your personal information on the Internet they're permitted to passively stalk you. School districts also stick their noses into your social media accounts for various reasons, though I know the school districts here in California try to justify it claiming that it's to combat cyberbullying or stamp out racist/homophobic/sexist behavior against students.

Not really, even if they do it's not necessarily because they're being terrible or immoral (at least not intentionally). Most people aren't born with malice in their hearts. I think people are getting a bit too cynical these days actually.

Miyamoto had stated that the F-Zero franchise was not dead in a 2015 Smosh Games interview and that there could be a potential new installment Nintendo were "to develop a unique controller interface for one of their upcoming consoles" (which we now know is the Nintendo Switch). It's very vague but I think Miyamoto is trying to figure out how to fit it in as an unique racing game. Nintendo's already has the extremely successful Mario Kart franchise, and we've seen what happened when Nintendo is forced to half-ass a game because the fans wanted the franchise – Star Fox Zero, anyone? I'm sure he has reason to withhold from creating an F-Zero game just yet and I rather not have him be rushed into creating one. It still has potential to return for the Switch now, though sometimes Nintendo is a bit secretive when it comes to their games.

Actually depend on what games you're talking about, if you're playing on a PC then usually those gaming discs are meant to only be put in once to install the game. These kinds of discs aren't very common now in Western countries because you can just buy the game online and install it there, and a huge concern is how wasteful it is; those one or two discs don't look like much but if we're talking about games like World of Warcraft or Star Wars: The Old Republic where millions of copies are being sold that could be an environmental concern, especially since gamers are far less likely to send used disks back because they need it for installing – what if you for some reason uninstalled the game but changed your mind and want to re-install it? PC games are one of these cases where it's probably better to just buy it online and sacrifice a bit of your bandwidth usage. People need to consider not just the convenience of digital copies but its accessibility. Plenty of locations don't have easy access to actual gaming stores and even if they do there's no guarantees that the game they want is there. Digital absolutely triumphs physical in this case; as long as you have Wi-Fi you can buy any sort of game online. Another problem is environmental concerns; a single physical gaming box doesn't look like much but you have to consider many triple-A gaming companies are churning these things out in the millions every month and realize how much plastic and paper they are using. Only less than a decade ago did the video game industry opt to remove the instruction manuals from gaming boxes to save paper, but it's still a hefty use of resources. Purchasing used games is only a small fix to a large problem because not everyone sells their games back to a gaming store (also driven by the fact that if you're not selling back a popular game it's likely you won't get much money – I've sold several non-triple-A games to Gamestop before and barely got a dollar) and not everyone wants to buy a used game for various reasons. Furthermore, the physical game industry is dominated by triple-A companies who can readily mass produce their games. Some developers don't have the money to do that and have to stick to releasing their games online on a distribution platform until they get sufficient funding. I do think the market for physical gaming copies is going to dwindle; digital distribution platforms like Steam are out-competing video game retailers, much like how Amazon is slowly starving retail stores, or how years before Netflix and Redbox killed Blockbuster. Sooner or later, physical gaming copies will only gain a niche market for collectors. This only applies to Western countries, especially the US; some countries like Japan have this tendency to retain old markets long after it has died elsewhere such as cell phones or fax machines. It could just be an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" cultural idea.

The Gameboy Advance one.

You said one was a carbon copy. That implies that both games are the same or somehow Counter-Strike copied off of Call of Duty, neither of which are the case.

Sounds like another way to fuel one's cynicism. Idiocracy is almost a cult classic by its own right.

DoTA is older than League of Legends and was a popular mod using the Warcraft III engine, then Valve obtained the intellectual rights in 2009 and made it into a fresh and updated game later in 2013. One didn't really copy the other, they're just MOBA games so they would share a lot of similarities. There's nothing bad with the game, but it seems like Valve cares about DoTA 2 more than it actually cares about its other games. Counter-Strike was also made in 2000 as a popular Half-Life mod-turned game; Call of Duty was made in 2003 and Battlefield 1942 was made in 2002. Plus, there are many differences in CS compared to CoD, such as different game physics, weapon functions, and mechanics.

On August 8, Valve made an "teaser" about a new game during this year's International DoTA 2 Championship which is set to be released in 2018. However, this game has received a lot of hate, as shown on YouTube where its trailer is nearing 45K dislikes. This game is called Artifact, which is a DoTA collectible card game; many people are angry about this for several reasons. First, it's seen as a blatant cash grab by Valve; many people here would know the extremely successful free-to-play collectible card game made by Blizzard Entertainment (the creator of Overwatch, Starcraft, Warcraft + World of Warcraft, and Diablo) named Hearthstone. Artifact is seen as trying to follow off Hearthstone's success by making a card game based off micro-transactions. Of course, there is nothing wrong with micro-transactions and many games do it successfully, nor is there anything wrong with trying to make money off a game, but the issue is when a company places priority on getting as much money as possible over the opinions and needs of its community and fans. Which brings us onto the second point: virtually no one asked for the game. No one wanted a card game, and if you look around the community, everyone wants a sequel or somehow a successor to their beloved games: Half-Life, Portal, and Left 4 Dead, which have been dormant for many years, or at least a significant update to a game like Team Fortress 2 or to a lesser degree Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Now with this teaser of Artifact, it really places Valve's attachment to the community in question; does it really care about TF2 or Half-Life or Portal? Year after year it seems like Valve has been prioritizing DoTA over all its other games (TF2 has an especially small and dwindling developer team) and leaving its fanbases out in the dark. And now over the years, gamers have been far more questioning of game companies for trying to trick its faithful fans into dumping money into their game economy or making promises that they can't keep or whether companies really have the gamers' needs and opinions in mind. For me, it's a bit sad to see how Valve, who has been making impactful games, have resorted to milking off millions from CS:GO knives or TF2 unusuals. Recently Konami has been taking a dump, too, with Hideo Kojima leaving and the failed spinoff that was Metal Gear Survive, as well as Activision with it's community-panned Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, which its trailer is also the 2nd most disliked video on YouTube to date (they're releasing another Call of Duty: WW2 in an attempt to return back to its roots, but many people in the community have their doubts).

God damn conservatives, calling hot dogs sandwiches. What's wrong with them?

Basically Michael Bay.

Anyone who has Huang or Hwang as a surname is related to the House of Ying and therefore Qin directly.

Qin Shi Huang. I win.

Nah, the APA hasn't recognized it as a disorder and pathology and it is simply a proposed disorder based off a certain psychologist's experiments. Otherwise, there is no confirmation, though it could be a reason for misdiagnosis of schizophrenia. Daydreaming isn't deeply studied as much as other aspects of sleep, memory, or detachment.

If you live in the US or Europe and haven't done a blood test and donation, it isn't likely you'll learn your blood type at all. But if you lived in an East Asian country such as South Korea, Japan, or Taiwan, where blood type personality theory is incredibly popular (and bogus, being completely psuedoscientific), you'll learn your blood type at a pretty young age. Mine is A+. Also, blood type A is more common in Asian countries than it is in Western countries.