Butterflies and Hurricanes in my Ass.

I love Muse!

He might be aware of this information, but I will pass this message to him, thanks on his behalf!

I know a friend who is about to go there in May for his MBA, the last time we talked he said he has no choice as he is already full in, he has taken loans and already completed the first year in some sort of online hybrid clsss so he can’t back off now as he says his life will be destroyed if he does so. So at this point he can only hope that he isn’t targeted. Seeing these news I can only imagine how dire it is, I hope he can work something out and don’t get himself into this mess.

They and possibly op (with their argument that 99.9% ad free) is referring to modern day advertisements that mass manipulates people. A person in 2000 BC telling their spice is better doesn’t compare to our modern advertisement system which targets suggestible people with well placed targeted ads. They also are probably referring to those ads which you constantly see barging into your every day life in the form of billboards, banners etc. If you were to search for a something in Google, most often the front result would be non relevant SEO garbage or AI gibberish promoting something which is not relevant to something you searched. Oh you want to know why you have this BSOD screen and warning, check out this antivirus software sort of bullshit results.

Even though what you said is right, that advertisement has fundamentally existed ever since human moved out of tribal society, the form of advertisement we see now is never before seen and in my opinion which I agree with OP is than we can indeed abolish current form of advertisement and move on without significant impact on normal people. Ofcourse we would still be documenting products and people who want that could still seek out what they want based on their requirement (this might qualify as advertisement since the product won’t be seen without information regarding it, but it’s no way comparable to the form of advertisement you and I mentioned above).

Ahh good old times, jumping from building to building like hulk. It had good story too which I didn’t appreciate the first time I played cause I was young and couldn’t understand it fully.

BTW, is there any no sleep or equivalent Lemmy community?

This reminds me of a no sleep material from reddit that I read, in that story there was a husband who kept playing a sims like game. He created himself and his wife in the game, even going as dar as naming them after themselves and creating the sim in a way that it resembled them and modelling the house after theirs. He kept role playing and playing that game for hours that it did affect his relationship with his wife and she was generally unhappy with him, at one point when he kept playing he noticed that his irl wife was getting distant and distant, meanwhile the sim wife was really happy with her husband. There are a lot that happens in between and then the story goes that one day he noticed his wife was really happy with him. But there was something weird with her, her eyes always fixated straight not showing much emotion other than the smile when she told him she loves him. It was like her wife went from really unhappy to happy but still weird. He passed his days doing his job, coming back to his house playing the sim game on his PC afterwards, his wife was not even bothered about it. One morning they were watching the TV together and she kept saying the same thing over and over again, he knew something was wrong and then he realised almost everyone in his work and other social setting was like that, he realised he has became a character in his own sim game.