Instead of headlights 2 feet off the ground, now we have overpowered searchlights (brighter = safer, amirite?) mounted 4 feet high, guaranteed to blind pedestrians and any shorter vehicle’s driver.
They will laugh and then keelhaul you.
Was waiting for my car, guy walks in and says to the manager “Hey, can you fix my girlfriend’s car? It’s, like, all fucked up” without elaborating further. As any public-facing job, they have some tolerance for bullshit and will probably ignore it.
IMO the “visual concept” is a weak argument - those are very abstract shapes.
each character conveys a word or concept rather than a single letter that has no inherent definition.
And each character consists of strokes, or even unjoined glyphs, making them more eqivalent to a word rather than a letter.
they even have words that are “swapable”
In languages that I know, order of compound words mostly matters but order of words in a sentence can change a lot. In Ukrainian and Russian, it could be used for emphasis without tone, e.g. “она пошла домой” (she went home, neutral), “домой она пошла” (she went home), “пошла она домой” (she walked home). But in English, at least in conversational, non-contorted way, word order has to be preserved.
alphabets (as those are based on sound)
Well, yes, but, actually, no. Alphabets co-evolved with pronunciation. While Ukrainian and Belarusian (AFAIK) are very close phonetically to written text, Russian has a lot of a-o sound swaps, and English, in addition to a = æ and the th sound is… Well, you just have to know how to pronounce every word because they could derive or be borrowed from Spanish or French or any other latin-script language, but for some reason they keep the original spelling.
Curiously enough, spoken Farsi sounds like Russian to me (I cannot understand it, but it must have the same sounds, phonemes, or pauses, not sure), and I am fluent in Russian.
German and Russian?! Maybe to a person not at all familiar with either Germanic or Slavic languages, but they are not as closely related at the other 2 pairs.
I saw a little change from the beginning of the game/competition (or whatever they called it in the book) forward.
Oh, I clearly remember he gets worse. Starts out with noble intents to be the least like the upper class (gold?) and not harm anyone, by the end of the book, MC is happily slaying security guards and “lesser” personnel.
“We installed postmarketOS on some older hardware, look, we are saving the planet!”
I am being facetious of course, but it would be great if manufacturers+google opened this up to everyone.
Sounds a bit like Bad Mojo, but it was a PC game.
Overrated, such wasted potential.
Abused miners on Mars rebelling against their overlords? Could parallel with any US labor movement of 20th century, labor strikes, even revolutions. Instead, all of that is thrown out a quarter of a way through the first book and we get a generic battle royale / hunger games.
Even in the game itself, the MC is saved by deus ex machina twice or thrice, has absurd luck, does very stupid things, and magically resolves conflicts by making long nonsensical speeches.
What I don’t understand is that the most desirable areas (home price, population growth) in the US are also very prone to natural disasters: floods in Carolinas, fires in S California, hurricanes in Florida, extreme heat in Texas and the southwest. Meanwhile, Great Lakes / rust belt area does not get many disasters, still has seasons, has access to fresh water, and yet, cities/areas populations are slowly decreasing or staying flat.