some additional relevant statistics

united states barely saw 1% growth year over year and are projecting that growth to continue to slow.

India has nearly 3x the users of the United States. the u.s. is still second because it’s the country it started in, but it’s not far ahead of the 3rd and 4th place countries. India is an extreme outlier.

unfortunately they don’t break down the age demographic by region, but I’d bet that if we specifically look at daily active users in the United States the age demo would skew much older.

so, it seems like it’s similar to what many fast food restaurants have been experiencing lately. the growth opportunities in the United States dried up so the decided to push like hell everywhere else. i bet the growth they saw in India over the last decade was explosive. probably bigger than anything they had ever seen before. bigger than when it was still growing in the u.s… meanwhile they project that over the next decade in the u.s. they’ll see maybe 8% user growth and that’s pretty optimistic.

so we probably won’t actually see much Facebook marketing in the u.s… the only way they can capture more u.s users is by buying more apps, like when they bought Instagram.

this does seem to imply that the part of the world where Facebook has become a fact of life is very specifically India. I’m sorry to hear that for them.

it’s it’s gotta be something very difficult that no one has ever fund before.

the only reason to write that book would be for when i would inevitably get to post the “don’t create the torment nexus” meme for tons of social media impressions.

though knowing what impressions are pegs me as a creative who won’t get to post on social media from the mines.

the robots won’t be equipped to fix it. there will be no one left to tell they got it wrong.

same reason harlan ellison wrote i have no mouth and i must scream i suppose…

nah, it’s going to be the opposite.

if other computer technology has been anything to go off of then only those who lived through is adaption and watched it progress will know how to spot it. those who grow up with hard to spot ai will just accept that they can’t see it and think we’re weird for trying so hard to prove things are ai. they’ll also think we’re weird for caring.

our boomer trait will be doing art instead of asking ai to generate images and video, or wanting things made by people when the ai generated thing is “good enough”.

we’ll be getting eyerolls for gifting a nice art set or a camera to our niblings. we’ll embarrass our grandkids when we get upset at the ai point of sale system that mcdonalds starts using. “back in my day they had big touch screens where you could manually select your toppings on the burger, now you just yell into a box and MAYBE gets it right”

actually, if social media tech is anything to go on we won’t even have that much control. your order will be algorithm based. chosen for you based on your recent ad footprint. the ai obviously knows what you want better than you do. the kids won’t see it as weird. they’ll transition straight from their parents deciding their meals to corporations doing the same, but we’re going to hate it. the corps will push it anyway because it’s so massively profitable with the demographics that like it and every restaurant will be owned by like 2 companies. they’ll just force it on everyone else. we’ll bitch about it, but most people will still keep going.

edit: had more thoughts on this in the shower.

we’ll get to the point where we barely even have to pick a place to eat. there will be 2 apps. one owned by disneycokemcdonsldsalibaba, one owned by pepsifoxraytheonamazon. we will all be either a coke person or a Pepsi person and will likely just follow whichever brand our parents did. they’ll be inherently political and each have a sponsored candidate in every election. it will define the entire world you live in. when it’s time to eat you get a notification and the app orders you your meal.

it’ll start as a service for when you can’t decide what to eat then after it gets a critical mass of users it will start to enshitify into forcing what you eat before selling to the disney megacorp who will then push it into everything they own.

this is only for the rich people that these brands cater towards of course. we who would have once been creatives will be working manual labor at the camps for the underemployed. afterall, we’re better off with the structure. it helps us be productive towards society. it’s what’s best for us…

only because people never stopped asking it to be able to id birds.

they’re just both wearing their most expensive outfits.

ah yes, ignoring that it should actuality be a polygon, implying a closed shape with straight sides much like this ignores the “weapon” and “used for thrusting or striking” parts of the definition.

not hard to make strange things fit a definition when you just ignore parts of it.

they seem more common in places that are concerned about water usage. they’re basically the norm now in Colorado.

wait, did she get pushed ahead like 2 years. why would she be graduating at 16?

a 25 year old being attracted to an 18 year old really isn’t weird to me…

edit: also, how the fuck does saying that to a graduation post even imply attraction. the critical commentor in that post is just being a dumb asshole.

yeah that’s about it, but they call it as i spelled it, and they were huge.

https://www.jimmysgrotto.com/

i grew up near a place that had something they called a ponza rotta.

it was the pizza equivalent of a chimichanga. it was a deep fried calzone. my high school had a tradition of trying to run a ponza mile instead of a beer mile. last one to puke after eating a whole ponza and running a mile won. only ever knew one person to actually finish the mile.

kind of, it’s more like it starts a geralt’s story, but becomes ciri’s story. the first two books are all geralt. after that it’s about geralt and ciri’s relationship. then by the last book we barely even see geralt.

then after the series was finished he started writing more little stories from earlier in geralt’s life.

as i said in another comment. it’s downright bizarre that ciri doesn’t get mentioned until the third game. she almost makes more sense as the protag anyway.

no, but she kind of wanted to… but it’s also way more fucked than that. please don’t make me type it out here. I’ll just say it involves violent rape while she’s still under age. it could be construed as a trauma response, but it’s debatable… I’m not convinced that sapkowski would have known what a trauma response was when he wrote that scene in the… 90s?

can’t actuality remember which book that happened in.

oh yeah, it’s been a while. details at foggy.

anyone who has read the books was likely surprised that ciri wasn’t the main character of any of the games when they first started coming out :::especially since geralt dies at the end of the books :::

ciri was more the mc than geralt for most of the books. she’s the child of destiny. she’s the young character that grows up as we follow their journey. she’s the one that finds herself and shows major character development throughout the books. the only character development geralt goes through is accepting his bond with ciri.

the first two games never mentioning ciri was outright bizarre tbh. only even remotely possibly because geralt lost his memory. like, with where geralt as at by the end of the books the only thing you could possibly expect him to do on regaining his memory is frantically search for signs of his adopted daughter

to a longtime book reader my reaction to ciri being the protag of the next game was “FINALLY”

my only curiosity at this point is how much she’ll be like book ciri. does she know magic? in the books ciri goes to sorceress school and then gets trained in primal magic by unicorns and immortal space elves. can you fuck a horse? that was one of the more… questionable scenes in the book.

tangent: sapkowski’s politics occasionally bleed through in weird ways in the books. like three’s a scene where a woman finds out she’s pregnant mid way through a literal war that our band wades through on their journey to save the world. the party basically needs the woman to proceed. she does not want the child. i believe it was the product of rape. yet for some reason geralt and a literal fucking vampire convince her that abortion is wrong and she should keep it instead of drinking a potion about it. it was so randomly out of character for everyone involved. but hey, that’s catholics for you i guess… /tangent

i think they generally said that ciri lost her elder blood powers after the king of the hunt was killed right? otherwise I’m gonna be really curious how handle that as well. she should be sort of the world’s greatest sorceress otherwise. ooh, i wonder if she’ll make quips about cyberpunk and/or other worlds she’s traveled to. like, she spent Decent bit of time in Arthurian legend. she shows up briefly in Victorian London.

also, what will the world at large look like? they can’t do it like the last time where your previous save could alter the new game based on your decisions. you were simply able to do too much. they’d need to make like 3 entirely separate stories at the very least. like, who rules the north? are you the empress of nilfguard? is the church burning all the nonhumans at record pace? you can basically decide the entire fate of the northern realms and all of its people in multiple ways… unless it just takes place elsewhere. maybe we’ll be in zerrikania this time or some shit. there are many distant lands that the games never take us. it would be much more doable that way. then you’d just have to change dialogue and maybe swap out a few characters.

aaaanyway… yeah, anyone mad about her being the mc is a dumbass that doesn’t know shit about the story.

hell, the entire anti-fap movement like 5 years ago basically seemed to believe that virginity and never cumming would give guys super powers.

miku and Vista are the same age. more like cousins or siblings. both are from 2007, just looked it up.

damn, i never knew my manhood was so attached to my fingers. if i rip my nails off does that make me an alien, a woman, or a plucked chicken?