They wouldn't necessarily notice anything different, and if they find anomalies, they go for the round earth explanations. But there are some who are noticing strange things like UFOs.
That answer makes absolutely no sense.
Do you even understand how many amateur astronomers are there? From different countries, cultures, backgrounds and religions? Do you understand this? Do you have any concept of what that means? Not a single on of them is discussing the "anomalies" they observe, asking about them, discussing them online and among themselves, making publications about them, etc? They are all magically brainwashed, somehow, regardless of where they are, who they are, or what their background is.
Your other answers are equally stupid, so I'm not even bothering to answer them.
I really, really hope you are just a poe. Else I have to question your sanity.
But just to show I want to have a rational discussion about it, I'll answer some of your earlier questions:
The hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers all over the world, from different countries, cultures, backgrounds and religions. They do their own independent observations and measurements. They would notice something's off. They aren't talking. Are all of them in the world-wide conspiracy?
The thousands and thousands of seaship and airship captains, engineers and crew, from all over the world, from different countries, cultures, backgrounds and religions. They would notice that charts do not match traveling distances and times. They aren't talking. Are all of them in the world-wide conspiracy?
The hundreds of thousands of engineers, programmers and other professionals developing and manufacturing devices such as GPS that require precise measurements; all the workers that need to deal with distances between far-away places for logistics, and so on; all the companies from all around the world that launch communication satellites and so on. Different countries, backgrounds and cultures. They are not talking. Are all of them in the world-wide conspiracy?
The hundreds of thousands of astronomers, astrophysicists, geologists and so on, from different countries, cultures and backgrounds. None of them are talking. Are they in the conspiracy?
All the independent reporters, explorers, entrepreneurs and so on who have traveled all around the world, including the southern parts, made documentaries, research and so on, are not talking. Are they part of the conspiracy?
How many millions of people are there in the conspiracy?
because the continents aren't like leaves floating on a pond. They can't move great distances like that, and there is also not evidence that they have done that (because like with evolution, it takes millions of years, so it's unobservable).
We observe the continents moving right now. Can can measure it.
There is also more than enough evidence that this has been going on for a very long time. The magnetic striping of ocean floors is evidence that they have been moving for quite many millions of years, and quite long distances. It also gives a perfect explanation of how certain fossils in one continent continue on another continent, forming a perfect contiguous area, like if the two continents had at some point been joined at that point. That's just two examples of many.
You don't seem to understand the strength and effectiveness of inference from evidence. Or rather, you seem to only choose to infer things when it suits your fantasies, but dismiss it when it contradicts them, and conforms to science. (Isn't it funny how you argue from inference for a flat Earth, but dismiss inference when it's against it? Do you understand why that is?)
nfq, I don't think anybody is amused anymore about your flat earth BS (regardless of whether you are just poe'ing or being serious). Especially not since your clear unwillingness to have an actual rational discussion about it.
I recently got Magic Duels: Origins for the iPad, and besides being a free download, it's surprisingly lacking of any nags or popups. In fact, I have still to encounter a single in-app purchase when playing the story mode. (There are IAP's, but they are elsewhere in the game entirely.) So not all free games seem to be like that.
(Now, whether you consider it an "indie game" is a matter of definition.)
(And sorry for the non-FF related plug. Just wanted to comment.)
You worry me. And I'm not saying that as a joke. Completely seriously. I think there's something wrong here.
I would really, really not like to pry on personal matters, but do you by any chance use some kind of medication or something?
I just tried watching Ashleigh Ball's documentary A Brony Tale.
In it is a psychologist who appears to blame to 9/11 attacks for creating the cultural climate that would eventually foster the show's current fanbase.
I... really don't know what to say to that.
I think that neural network took some LSD.
It's funny how persistence of vision makes so that when you have watched the entire video nonstop, and then it ends, then everything looks like it's shrinking.
The traditional JRPG genre is pretty much a dead genre nowadays as well. I can count a few of the good games that were released recently (Bravely Default, Fire Emblem Awakening, Etrian Odyssey IV, Shin Megami Tensei IV, Persona Q - Shadow of the Labyrinth... etc). But that's it.
I liked Tales of Vesperia. (In fact, I'm betting most of the Tales games are good. It's just that I haven't had the chance to play many of them because they are so console-exclusive.)
I also think Infinite Undiscovery and Star Ocean The Last Hope were ok. (Also most other Star Ocean games are probably ok.)
Same thing goes for side scrollers. We got Cave Story, Rosenkreuzstilette, Koumajou Densetsu 1 and 2, Crescent Pale Mist, Grief Syndrome... etc.
It's not like the big boys are being quiet in that front either. I thought Ori and the Blind Forest was absolutely marvelous. (It's a really gorgeous-looking metroidvania game with high production values and good difficulty spikes, ie. it's not just a casual game.)
I actually remember hearing lots of good stuff about Lost Odyssey, but unfortunately right now I have nothing to play it on: my NTSC-J x360 bit the dust a year ago, but as I'm planning to visit Japan later this year, I might pick a new one up and give the game a shot. I'll definitely keep it in mind!
I have no idea about the Japanese release, but at least here (and perhaps in the Japanese version) there's an infamous problem about the game disks. The game comes in 4 DVDs (yes, it's that long), with the first three discs being in the normal slot, and the fourth in a paper envelope. And it's this last disc that's the problem: As the disc has been stored for years now, the paper in the envelope has stuck onto the readable surface of the DVD, creating a layer of paper stuff that makes the disc unreadable. You'll probably get reading errors. I had this problem too.
I read online about a fix. It sounds a bit crazy, but it worked: Dip the disc into boiling water for about 10 seconds, and then immediately dry it with a paper towel. Repeat if needed. Because nothing else worked, I tried this method, and it did indeed work.
(Since the Xbox 360 supports installing the contents of the game disc into the console's hard drive, I recommend always doing that. Not only does it improve loading times, at the same time it's a check that the entire disc is readable. And once it's installed onto the hard drive, you don't have to worry about the disc anymore, other than its header being readable.)
Lost Odyssey and Eternal Sonata might be somewhat like what you are looking for (although I'm not exactly sure about the "overly-padded gameplay" part... I think both games were fine.)
Suppose there existed a program that answers this question: Given a natural number (in base 10) and a set of mathematical operators, does there exist a closed-form expression that uses those operators (and numbers in base 10) that is equal to that input number, and that uses less symbols than the input number? (I'm counting each digit as a symbol, as well as each individual mathematical operator.)
I'm wondering what the computational complexity of that program would be.
I made the same "mistake" with Bravely Default as I often make with JRPGs, and that's that I level-grinded too much, and consequently the ultimate final boss was outright trivial to beat. That always feels a bit of a disappointment. Well, the rest of the game was excellent nevertheless.
(To be fair, that problem is not easy to solve. If enemies "level up" with you, then that removes the sense of achievement, of becoming stronger, because now you are always the same relative strength with enemies. This may actually feel worse than being able to become uber-strong and sweep the floor with the final boss with one hand tied behind your back.)
There are a lot more games than just RPGs that are basically just movies with some gameplay in them nowadays. There are a few games I played where I promptly thought to myself "Why did I waste my money on this? The game is so SHORT!".
It's just that I expected more from Square.
(And btw, FFX is not short. It's in fact too long, considering the amount of cutscenes and how boring they are. We are talking about 40+ hours or so.)
And the thing is, it's not like Square Enix isn't publishing actually good JRPGs even today. For example, Bravely Default is a fantastic JRPG. And it's not even a question of trying new things and new game mechanics, because this game does innovate and use new mechanics, but it still manages to keep the essentials of what makes a good JRPG a good JRPG.
(Of course it's hard to say how much involvement Square Enix had on developing the game. It was published by them, but developed by Silicon Studio. I have no idea how much Square Enix participated in the development. I'm assuming they did at some level at least, and made the important decisions on eg. the game mechanics and the overall style of the game.)
I love JPRGs. The first JRPGs I played were Dragon Warriors 2-4 (I especially loved 4). I have since played quite many of them, including the Final Fantasy series. (By now I have played all Final Fantasies from 1 to 9, as well as the ones described below.)
In the late 80's and the 90's Final Fantasy was the JRPG series, and Square was the JRPG company. (Ok, Enix and the Dragon Warrior series was also quite popular.) Whenever you saw the name "Square" attached to a game, and especially if the game's name had the words "Final" and "Fantasy" in it, you could be sure that the game was a thoroughly enjoyable high-quality JRPG game. This was the case from the first game to the 9th, and some of those games are not only considered the best JRPG's in existence, but some of the best video games overall.
Then something very strange happened. Square stopped making JPRGs, at least for the Final Fantasy series. I would even go so far as to say that Square stopped making Final Fantasy games. Instead, they started making completely different games with the name "Final Fantasy" artificially slapped onto them.
Final Fantasy XIII is quite infamous. However, that trend didn't start with it. It actually started with Final Fantasy X. The HD version recently appeared on PSN, so I decided to buy it. I trusted Square Enix, and I deeply regret it.
I know I'm going to piss off a lot of people for saying this, but FFX is one of the worst games I have ever played. It's even worse than FF13 (something that I wouldn't have believed I would say in a million years; but I had never played FFX before, so...) I honestly cannot understand why FFX is loved so much; I just can't.
Everything that's wrong with FF13, FFX did it first. Short and extremely linear levels (more linear than even the most brainless run-of-the-mill first-person shooters), no overworld, no exploration, abstract scenery, an overabundance of cutscenes, and the removal of almost everything that makes a JRPG a JRPG.
And when I say "overabundance of cutscenes", I'm not kidding. You know the somewhat tongue-in-cheek criticism of modern video games that they are nothing but an extended cutscene that's occasionally interrupted by short segments of linear gameplay? Well, that's literally true for FFX, with no exaggeration, and in complete seriousness.
The amount of cutscenes in this game is simply staggering. Mind-boggling. Often you can't even walk for five seconds after the last cutscene without yet another cutscene kicking in. They are endless. Cutscene after cutscene after cutscene. It's extremely tedious, frustrating and boring. The only longer break from cutscenes is some of the longer battles. If we don't count battles, there is literally more cutscenes in this game than actual gameplay. (And even if we do count battles, even then it's a close call.) I sometimes had a big urge to scream in frustration when yet another cutscene started after mere seconds of gameplay after the last one. You seriously can't believe how many cutscenes there are in this game until you play it.
And the thing is, those cutscenes are boring. This is not exactly a literary masterpiece. While the story is arguably a lot easier to understand and follow than the obscure mess that was the story of FF13, it's still tedious, uninspired, boring, and even somewhat infantile. (And, naturally, cutscenes cannot be skipped.)
Personally I do not consider this a Final Fantasy game. It's some other completely different game series with the words "Final Fantasy" attached to it. (The same is true for FF13, for that matter.)
What happened to Square Enix? Why did they stop making Final Fantasy games? They were some of the greatest games ever made, and now they aren't making them anymore. For some reason they stopped. They started doing some completely different game series, which are frustrating, tedious and boring, and have nothing to do with JRPGs.
I trusted Square Enix and spent 50€ on this. I didn't think know that the FF13 trend had started with this game. I thought it would be an actual FF game. I feel like cheated.
(I have no idea what kind of game FF12 is because I have never played or seen it, but considering FFX and FF13, I'm not expecting it to be any better. And I'm not having high hopes for FF15 either. It will probably be just another entry in this new non-FF game series, although I hope I will be pleasantly surprised. I won't be buying it before I know for sure, though.)
Of course then there are those who say that the Earth is hollow. (Just look it up.)
Then there are those who say that the Earth is actually expanding like a balloon. (Also look it up.)
Why do you choose to believe one silly pseudoscientific claim over other, contradictory ones? Do you throw dice to decide which one you will believe?
And like I mentioned earlier, there are military forces in Antarctica which kill you if you try to go find the edge of the flat earth. The military people don't have to know anything about the round earth conspiracy, they're just hired to do a job.
What's the size of the border of the Earth? Are there soldiers around dozens of thousands of kilometers, just to protect a secret that has no relevance for mass dominance?
The amount of people in that conspiracy is rather staggering. Any seaship captain and airplane pilot would notice that distances in charts do not correspond to actual traveling times; therefore every single one of them must be in the conspiracy. As are, of course, all the geologists and other scientists who study the Earth, as well as all the astrophysicists, etc. All the companies that make communication satellites would also notice something's odd, so they have to be in the conspiracy. All these regardless of their country, culture or background. For example all Chinese, Japanese and Indian scientists are in a conspiracy with European, Northern and Southern American scientists, as well as Australian and African scientists, even though their cultures, religions and backgrounds are completely different. Amateur astronomers would also notice something's off, but they don't say anything; thus they are all in the conspiracy.
Of course you would have to also explain how when the Moon and the Sun set, they don't change apparent size, yet they are always visible somewhere on Earth. Or how your traveling time from South Africa to South America is much shorter than it should be. Or how time-lapses of the night sky quite clearly show stars moving as if we were on a round, rotating planet. Perhaps we are all in a huge conspiracy to hide it.
I bet you are one of the conspirators! Confess!
Conspiracy theories are just fabrications, fantasies, they are not real.
So there are no conspiracies in the world? Nobody tries to deceive anybody?
I'm talking about the popular and silly ones. Those that go against science and what we know of reality because of undeniable overwhelming evidence (and because of the physical impossibility of the conspiracy theory being true.)
Scientists can be deceived too. They're not necessarily knowingly in a conspiration.
That's exactly what the scientific method tries to eliminate (and does so quite efficiently.) These are the peer-reviewing process, the double-blind experiments, etc. This is a very rigorous process that eliminates biases, opinions and things like coercion. The scientific process does not rely on a few individual scientists; it relies on the vast scientific community which has centuries of expertise in testing and finding flaws.
It's the exact process that pseudoscientists and conspiracy theorists don't like, because it exposes them for the phonies they are.
And how can we know that we can trust this scientific process? Because it produces actual tangible results: The computer you are using right now is the result of a couple of hundreds of years of science and technology. It's a testament of how well science works. You don't have to simply take their word for it: You have the actual evidence in front of you: It works.
Pseudoscience and conspiracy theories don't work. They don't result in practical applications. They do not advance our understanding of how reality works, thus leading to practical results. It's not science; it's fiction.
The first "evidence" is presented at the 45 seconds mark... And it's clearly, really clearly, fake; not edited I think, but fake in the sense that it doesn't show a "2nd sun", or even a celestial body.
A lens flare, a reflection in a window (if it's videoed through one), or a phantom sun. (Assuming it's not just post-processing fakery.)
Edit: If you meant the Wikipedia article says the dot in that one image is smaller than a pixel, then I assume you read wrong. I’m not gonna bother checking.
"Subpixel" doesn't actually mean the same as "invisible".
If you photograph a detail that's smaller than a pixel, it will be dimmer than if it were the exact size of a pixel. It doesn't just vanish completely. The photograph will of course have one pixel of a certain color where that sub-pixel detail was; it's just that the pixel will be dimmer. (Very roughly, the brightness of the detail is directly proportional to how much of the pixel's area it covers.)
Since I know things which many people don't know, it would be immoral to be silent.
There are also other reasons why I post the things I do, but at this moment in time, I have not been given authority to reveal them...
If you are (still) just trolling, then congrats, you got me, yada yada.
But in case you are still being serious, can't you see how delusional you are making yourself seem? In fact, if you are actually being completely serious, can't you see how delusional you are being?
Conspiracy theorists have this great ability to spin the narrative to make it look like something that it isn't. Conspiracy theorists are so-called "spin doctors" in this sense. They use all the tricks in the book to deceive, to change the appearance of things to look like something completely different. They cherry-pick, take things out of context, abuse psychological phenomena like pareidolia, biases, etc. They are like stage magicians: They make you think you are seeing (or not seeing) something that isn't actually real, via diversion, deception and psychological manipulation and trickery. They abuse the fact that most people do not have the knowledge, expertise nor experience to spot the flaws in the arguments and tidbits that they present. They fabricate a fictional picture out of the cherry-picked tidbits that they isolate from their context. And all of this, of course, with a healthy dose of outright fabrications and lies.
They also appeal to the natural desire that people have to not be deceived (which is rather ironic, really). People want to be above deception, to see through it, to not be just sheep being misled. They want to be in control. They like the idea of being "in the loop", to know all the hidden secrets that the majority of the populace doesn't know. They like the idea of knowing what others don't. Yet, quite ironically, they are being deceived by these spin doctors, who abuse this psychology to the maximum. It's basic con-artistry 101: Make the mark believe that he is in control, when in fact he is just being manipulated by the con-artist. This give the mark a false sense of security and safety, of being above deception.
The thing is, these cons never stand up to closer scrutiny, ie. to actual observation, measurement and controlled testing. That's because they are just that: Cons. It's deception. Conspiracy theories are just fabrications, fantasies, they are not real. (Of course the conspiracy theorists want to make you believe that their theories pass those tests, but that's just part of the deception. They make lots of claims about successful tests, yet they can't present actual scientific peer-reviewed results. Of course if somebody questions them about this, they will just attribute it to a world-wide scientific conspiracy. As if the whole world-wide scientific community were in a secret private club that agrees to discredit them. How convenient.)
If you believe in these conspiracy theories, you are being deceived. You are not in control, you are not above deception. You are just being conned. You have been blinded by their tricks, and you can't see the flaws.
Scientific inquiry, however, works much better. That's because of the strict peer-reviewing process. When a result is presented to the world-wide scientific community, it will be scrutinized and shredded apart to find even the most minute of flaws. If you present the results of some experiment, somebody is going to try to repeat it. Somebody somewhere is going to ask questions about it and see the errors. If the errors cannot be fixed, then the hypothesis is discarded.
Since the world-wide scientific community consists of hundreds of thousands (if not even millions) of people from all around the world, from different countries, cultures and backgrounds, it's insane to think that they all could be in a huge world-wide conspiracy. That's just a physical impossibility. You can't coordinate millions of people from all around the world like this. It's just not possible. (And who exactly would be doing the controlling anyway? And how would they expect to succeed?)
(free public schools are part of the communist plan for indoctrinating people [1]).
I am making this suggestion in complete seriousness: I think you should stop that (not only in this thread, but overall), for your own sake. This is not an attempt to silence or censor, I'm honestly just trying to help.
It doesn't even matter if you are writing that kind of stuff as a joke or in all seriousness. It just makes people not take you seriously. Why would you want to do that? You know that people are not going to take you seriously, and the more you write stuff like that, they will only gain more prejudice against everything you say. In other words, it hurts your credibility, not only in these matters, but in everything. So why do it?
Of course if you really, really want to keep doing it, there's nothing stopping you. But why would you want to? What's the purpose? You are only hurting your own reputation in the process for no benefit.
