yeah, I had heard of that, I’m hoping that since it was a while ago and most of them were the ones done by automated systems and not going through it comment by comment editing them, but I’ll keep at it, if I have to sneak one edit through a day or something.
Pretty much, when they removed search engines who wouldn’t pay them was the final straw and I went back to reddit (after not being there since the API debacle) 1 last time and replaced all my 26,000 karma worth of comments with “Comment removed in protest of Reddit blocking search engines.” Took me a while, but meh, if they want to hasten its enshitification, I don’t mind doing my part.
A Mary Sue can still fail, they just usually succeed. The biggest issues with a Mary Sue aren’t their success, its the believability of their success. Is it reasonable for this person to be so skilled. If they have PHD level knowledge in 15 different fields, that’s a bit much. But they may have PHD level knowledge in 1 or 2 fields, and they may be able to get through like that without coming off as a Mary Sue, look at The Martian by Andy Weir (or the movie with Matt Damon) The premise of sending people with 2 PHDs in complementary fields to reduce the number of people needing to be sent makes logical sense, so him being an expert, and also being the right kind of expert, to survive makes sense. And the fact he isn’t an expert in everything else helped drive the narrative and provided the direction and the plot in a reasonable and believable way.
I think that’s what is important, not making your character flawless, or even introducing some flaws to a flawless character, because that still ends up coming off weird, but instead start with a flawed character and then remove flaws until you have just enough to make everything the character needs to survive believable. Another view of this, Die Hard, John McClaine wasn’t the typical Mary Sue, he wasn’t perfect and the audience feels like he’s constantly in danger and just a mixture of skill and luck gets him through it. A flawed character is more impactful to the reader. I am a flawed person, I relate better to flawed people.
nowhere near VA, I’m in AZ, no experience with it there.
I’ve had some experience with Mint Mobile, but couldn’t get it to activate where I live. The sim worked fine visiting Vegas, but back in my home state, even though it runs on T-Mobile’s network and T-Mobile was fine, the same sim with a phone number with an area code in my home state didn’t work in my home state. So, maybe it works, but the one time I tried it wouldn’t work and Mint couldn’t get it working just kept saying everything is fine and it should be working.
Tried StraightTalk Wireless after that, 2 different sims so far, no issues, other than I had to get a new sim when the account was inactive for 6 to 8 months. But at least now their sim packs come with both Verizon and notVerizon compatible sims in the same pack now.
I use https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09TB83NR2?ref=emc_s_m_5_i_atc and I just don’t use the wifi, everything can be done on device or from a PC you plug the SD card into. I know you said you want it without wifi, but without more details I don’t know if “without wifi” is a necessity or if it just is fully functional without using “wifi” is sufficient for your needs. By default wifi is disabled while the camera has power to it and is recording, and its wifi enabled/disabled state can be changed in the menu to keep it off.
Gmail wasn’t even the first, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, there were tons of free email offerings, even sites that would host your whole website for free like geocities. Gmail came into the market when 3rd party email being free was already well established. They just followed an Apple style of development, taking something that already exists and made a better version of it. Also back then their motto was still “Don’t Be Evil” and they mostly still kept to it, so they used that goodwill and the better user experience to grow it at a massive rate. And for the most part, its still the best experience for email for many cases.
If you’ve ever been forced to use Teams you must already know they scraped the bottom of their talent barrel for the team that works on it… The software is shit, riddled with bugs to the point where at one point I used to only be able to use teams on my browser because the desktop app just decided to never let me access the text chat, and the browser version I would load it would be a white screen and I would have to refresh 3 times for it to load. But at least it worked after those 3 refreshes. And it was exactly 3 refreshes every single time, never 2, never 4, and 5 was right out. It was always without fail 3 refreshes. Whether loading from Firefox, Chrome, or Edge. Fortunately we don’t have too many meetings with people using Teams these days, so I haven’t had to use it in a while, but its easily in my top 5 worst software I’ve been forced to deal with. Maybe Top 3. But its still miles behind Magento. Fuck Magento, just thinking of it right now gets my blood pumping and I refused to work with it ever again about 10 years ago… Fuck Magento. Teams is at least a distant 2nd or 3rd to that. Absolute crap.
I use Blink cameras for my outdoors, but they also make indoor cameras as well and with the Sync Module you can keep clips and have motion detection without storing any data on the cloud or needing a subscription. Cheap, but they work well. Their “Cloud” service was shit when I tried it with the 30 days free, so shit, I ended up canceling it so I could just use the Sync Module after about 2 weeks.
Its “Walz”, no t, and yeah, Daily Show already made that association yesterday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1geBpDjYb7c within the first minute of the clip.