I'm not. The first season was great, a nice little star wars story with memorable characters, nice character arc, a good overall narrative arc. The second season was a setup for two spinoff shows, both of which I didn't have much interest in. Let's not mention Luke Skywalker, who absolutely had to be there because Star Wars can't do without him. The third season implied that I had to watch a show I had no interest in for the full story, and honestly was really mediocre for me. I have zero interest in this movie because of that last season.
Truth be told, I wouldn't be surprised if a certain amount of Star Wars fatigue is setting in as well, at least for me. Most of the TV stuff produced since Disney took over has been averaging towards mediocre or falling flat. I feel it's like post-Endgame Marvel, where as a viewer you've kind of gotten what you want out of the franchise and are ready for something entirely different. I think that if Andor is the last thing Star Wars I watch, it can end for me on a high note.
> we could only get the physical cards at the airport and at some tourist office, and we forgot to look for it at the airport
Little over a decade ago I did exactly the same. I ended up buying a Suica card at Ueno station from a clerk, which was a bit of an adventure since she was eager to help but barely spoke any English and I barely spoke any Japanese. Together we skillfully massacred both languages with an ad-hoc pidgin and lots of gesturing. Due to an issue with my wireless hotspot I only had an old school phrasebook at my disposal, which was about as helpful as the infamous Monty Python sketch implies. The airport seemed much more convenient as a tourist since everyone there at the very least spoke basic English. At the time it was certainly possible to get a Suica card at a major train station, though admittedly not easy.
> The game has civilizations transform into other ones.
This is the most significant gameplay change for this edition, and from a concept point of view it's not a terrible idea, but the execution is extremely jarring. As you progress into the next age the game basically gets a reset. Alliances are gone, trade is reset, city states disappear unless you've pulled them into your civilization, most buildings become obsolete, units get reorganized in a rather dramatic way.
I get what they're trying to do, they're trying to balance the mid and late game to prevent snowballing.
The problem with the way they've done it is that as you progress towards the end of the second age, as a player you have very few incentives to actually build most improvements. Outpace the AI in research and culture, or outproduce them and lay waste to their big cities.
The settlement limit as you go into the second age also tends to penalize early expansion, another balancing measure. You find the "new world" but you can't just go ahead and do the massive landgrab because doing so comes with a set of penalties which you'll have to offset by building things that'll compensate and in turn stunt growth. As you approach the end of the second age that limit is raised drastically which I can only guess is to promote conquest at that point, since the existing factions on the other continent will tend to expand but not be powerful enough to stop you from steamrolling them.
It leaves you with the impression that ages are just designed to stunt growth and expansion and you're fairly confined unless you want to stack penalties. I got the impression the AI doesn't deal with the reset particularly well either, since some AI players which were fairly strong early on started faltering in the second age.
Finally, the ages mechanic comes with an end-age crisis, which rather than an interesting challenge turns into a bunch of busywork. In the second age the crisis I got was religion related, where you get to pick your poison and then deal with your choice. In my case I had a choice to invest into a lot of buildings to boost happiness as the AI sent out waves of missionaries to stamp out my religion, or just churn out missionaries. The latter was cheaper and didn't take up precious space.
> you need to spread improvements across tiles instead of building tall.
I have mixed feelings about this in the long game. It's nice to see cities sprawl out into districts/quarters, but at the same time you're trading resources for growth. Overbuilding is a nice mechanic, but in the end I feel that buildings becoming obsolete at the end of an age makes me not want to invest too much in certain buildings despite having a massive amount of production. A particular game I played I ended up with Rome next to the sea, which grew and grew until there was no room for expansion anymore until the end of the age. Maybe it'd have been better to have one or two more buildings in a district?
In Civ 6 I felt it was a neat feature with some nice gameplay mechanics, but in 7 I feel the mechanic has expanded so much that you're constantly weighing options trying to plan ahead that it weighs things down. Maybe I'll feel differently about it over time.
> I’m pretty happy with Civ VII, and I think popular opinion is 50-50 right now
Honestly, this is the first time I'm really on the fence about Civ. There's a lot of ideas in there that kind of work, but at the same time kind of don't work. If I were to summarize my sentiment in a single sentence: the motto "a civilization to stand the test of time" has been supplanted with the dread of looming impermanence whispering "this too will pass".
> There is nothing in the world that is as good as soundcloud was in 2012.
Around 2009-2010 the local scene was thriving with netlabels. Most of those netlabels were just a static HTML page with a list of releases, a ZIP file and an album cover. If you ended up at some event, you'd discover the netlabel and you'd look at their releases on their webpage. Soundcloud came at just the right time for me to become the Web 2.0 equivalent of the indie music scene. You'd discover an artist at some event, or via a netlabel release, and then find out what else they were doing and just keep up with them. If you were a musician it was just too convenient.
> It was as close as the world could practically get to copy-left, remix culture, and they threw it away because the founders lacked guts or vision or both
This is exactly what was happening locally. A few of those netlabels had releases under creative commons licenses, with artists encouraging people to remix their tracks, offering up stems for download and the whole scene thrived on some really neat remixes, which usually ended up on Soundcloud and you ended up discovering that remixer's original work in the process.
I think the tide turned when everyone started to just dump everything on soundcloud. At some point it became so popular that DJ mixes started to dominate feeds, people just started dumping other people's work on there and then not-quite-so-indie labels started using it for promotion. It was a matter of time before the rights holder collection agencies started smelling blood in the water and the first articles of "soundcloud is not paying royalties" appeared.
It's around that time that Soundcloud just became less and less useful to me. The local netlabels and indie scene ended up using Soundcloud less, opting for Twitter and other social media for promotion while releasing on Bandcamp. People who used to be very active there just reposted other people's releases until those fizzled out too. Over the course of a year or two it went from the place to discover exciting new music to the place nobody paid attention to.
> perhaps the fediverse has an opportunity to step in here… perhaps we just need a new crop of founders who believe in a world full of diverse musical culture
I honestly think it was lightning in a bottle, the right thing at the right time. The once diverse radio landscape had been dying for a while, with each station sounding the same and no longer catering to various subcultures, which often weren't very advertiser friendly. The variety of record stores were disappearing in favor of online distribution leaving only the really big chains who rarely bothered with promoting the new and unknown unless it came from a major label. With the record labels railing against online distribution at the time and various well known artists going off and directly releasing their music online, few really wanted to have anything to do with traditional labels.
I think the success of the local netlabels at the time came from all that which in turn at least locally fed into soundcloud being the missing link. I don't think you can really recreate all that, certainly not the momentum the copyleft licenses had. Adding the fediverse to it feels like just adding an extra set of hoops to jump through for discoverability.
With the Bandcamp situation I do feel it's time for something new and exciting, but it will coast on inertia for a while like Soundcloud did before becoming a shadow of its former self.
> I just want an IPv4/IPv6 proxy that does nothing other than delay, rate-limit, and/or drop packets.
About 15 years ago I needed to emulate a network over a satellite link. We had limited amount of time on the dish and it was a fairly costly affair. We had a small rack of hardware together with a bunch of measuring instruments that would be in the field for data acquisition. It would be sending back data home where it would be processed and then sent back into the field. The (limited) bandwidth reserved and the inherent latency on the link gave us some interesting issues to deal with, but it required a few iterations to get things working smoothly.
The rack had a Linux box which acted as a router (among other things), and while it was in the office we'd just hook it up via ethernet. So I used tc[0] on there to introduce a fixed latency on transmission and cap the outgoing bandwith to whatever was available on the link. I did the same on the homestation for outgoing traffic but there I just used an old box with two ethernet ports and set it up as a bridge.
For dropping packets I used iptables, and some other things.
It requires some familiarity with the LARTC[1], which isn't the most readable document, and how things work in Linux. It gave us exactly what we needed without having to pay for time on the dish for testing.
It's been over a decade and the details are extremely vague, but I'm sure that if you want to you could mark certain packets with netfilter and then delay those packets somehow, rather than just delay the entire network device. I remember that with iptables we used to mark packets from SSH in the mangle table and then use that mark with tc to give traffic marked priority on the outgoing device.
It's not exactly a proxy, but back in the day it worked for that specific use case.