A Mary Sue can still fail, they just usually succeed. The biggest issues with a Mary Sue aren’t their success, its the believability of their success. Is it reasonable for this person to be so skilled. If they have PHD level knowledge in 15 different fields, that’s a bit much. But they may have PHD level knowledge in 1 or 2 fields, and they may be able to get through like that without coming off as a Mary Sue, look at The Martian by Andy Weir (or the movie with Matt Damon) The premise of sending people with 2 PHDs in complementary fields to reduce the number of people needing to be sent makes logical sense, so him being an expert, and also being the right kind of expert, to survive makes sense. And the fact he isn’t an expert in everything else helped drive the narrative and provided the direction and the plot in a reasonable and believable way.

I think that’s what is important, not making your character flawless, or even introducing some flaws to a flawless character, because that still ends up coming off weird, but instead start with a flawed character and then remove flaws until you have just enough to make everything the character needs to survive believable. Another view of this, Die Hard, John McClaine wasn’t the typical Mary Sue, he wasn’t perfect and the audience feels like he’s constantly in danger and just a mixture of skill and luck gets him through it. A flawed character is more impactful to the reader. I am a flawed person, I relate better to flawed people.

nowhere near VA, I’m in AZ, no experience with it there.

I’ve had some experience with Mint Mobile, but couldn’t get it to activate where I live. The sim worked fine visiting Vegas, but back in my home state, even though it runs on T-Mobile’s network and T-Mobile was fine, the same sim with a phone number with an area code in my home state didn’t work in my home state. So, maybe it works, but the one time I tried it wouldn’t work and Mint couldn’t get it working just kept saying everything is fine and it should be working.

Tried StraightTalk Wireless after that, 2 different sims so far, no issues, other than I had to get a new sim when the account was inactive for 6 to 8 months. But at least now their sim packs come with both Verizon and notVerizon compatible sims in the same pack now.

yup, those too.

My initial question was did this “researcher” just discover SMTP Open Relay? Cause if so I can do the exact same thing by configuring my SMTP server to open relay then using telnet to connect to it and issue the SMTP commands directly and it will send the email as though sent from whatever email address I want. This has been a known issue with SMTP for decades at this point and can’t be reliably resolved with SMTP, but since the whole world uses it for email, its probably not going away any time soon. However to mitigate it as much as possible is what DMARC DNS entries are supposed to help with, by providing assurance that the email was sent by an SMTP server allowed to send email on behalf of the domain.

I used to send people emails from themselves to demonstrate why they can’t trust the “from” address when they get an e-mail.

I use https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09TB83NR2?ref=emc_s_m_5_i_atc and I just don’t use the wifi, everything can be done on device or from a PC you plug the SD card into. I know you said you want it without wifi, but without more details I don’t know if “without wifi” is a necessity or if it just is fully functional without using “wifi” is sufficient for your needs. By default wifi is disabled while the camera has power to it and is recording, and its wifi enabled/disabled state can be changed in the menu to keep it off.

He didn’t pass away, he just ascended with the other bridgeburners.

Gmail wasn’t even the first, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, there were tons of free email offerings, even sites that would host your whole website for free like geocities. Gmail came into the market when 3rd party email being free was already well established. They just followed an Apple style of development, taking something that already exists and made a better version of it. Also back then their motto was still “Don’t Be Evil” and they mostly still kept to it, so they used that goodwill and the better user experience to grow it at a massive rate. And for the most part, its still the best experience for email for many cases.

I use Blink cameras for my outdoors, but they also make indoor cameras as well and with the Sync Module you can keep clips and have motion detection without storing any data on the cloud or needing a subscription. Cheap, but they work well. Their “Cloud” service was shit when I tried it with the 30 days free, so shit, I ended up canceling it so I could just use the Sync Module after about 2 weeks.

It can do stuff that running in your browser can not. Since electron runs both the client-side code and the server-side nodeJS you can communicate between the rendering engine and the back-end for tasks that a web browser alone wouldn’t allow you to do, like accessing and navigating your local file system for example. Or if the app has a lot of assets and it needs to work offline, you can have the nodeJS backend download the files and encrypt them and have the front-end query the nodeJS and to get the decrypted assets and use the whole web app offline completely with a local database that you may sync with a webserver at some point later if or when internet connectivity is restored.

For most apps its overkill, but Electron and NodeJS can do pretty much anything a native app can do (just slower and while using a LOT more resources than a native app) but can be done entirely by someone experienced in web frontend development and nodeJS.

You provide your own API access key, so instead of using the developer’s API access key you use your own, which as long as you stay under the request limit lets you use it with free tier. You still lose all access to NSFW content though.