CrushKillDestroySwag [none/use name]

I switched over to this script on my desktop, and I use NewPipe on mobile. The script requires you to disable your ad blocker for YT, and then uses a different method to bypass ads that hopefully google will be less likely to patch.

I wanna say “my” first PC was an intel 486, with a hard drive and a floppy drive, and whatever cheap monitor/mouse/keyboard came with it from the Post Exchange. I was in elementary school so it was all a bit over my head, but my mom had gotten it for work because they were moving all of their records to digital and she didn’t want to get left behind, and I used it to instantly improve my failing “penmanship” grade at school by doing all of my homework in a word processor. I think I had a Genesis at this time so I never played DOS games much beyond the Lemmings and Dragon’s Lair demos.

My first PC was an early Celeron, and I remember upgrading it with a Sound Blaster Extigy, and then later an early Radeon. That PC later got RAM and hard drive upgrades too, I really pushed that hardware for as long as I possibly could before upgrading again, running everything at the lowest settings and just “dealing with” under-thirty framerates for just about everything from Lego Island to the first Harry Potter games. I didn’t really care though because my jam pretty much that entire decade was Starcraft, with Jedi Knight 2 coming in close second.

VLC: I’m here to help.

For both wine and liquor I find that presentation will impress people way more than price. Get a cool looking decanter and you’re basically set as far as the average wine drinker goes - as for liquor, I have a Crystal Head Vodka bottle that I rinse out and pour whatever I’m drinking into, which is a lot cheaper than buying another Crystal Head lmao.

Starfield for “Most Innovative Gameplay”

I was just talking about urban rents. The fact of the matter is that climate change will not be addressed without significantly reducing the number of cars on the road, EVs or no, and you can’t do that without overhauling urban sprawl.

The fun part is that many societies have had and currently have dirt cheap urban rents, accurately reflecting the efficiency and lower cost of supplying services to people in urban areas. This isn’t even a capitalism/socialism thing, since plenty of capitalist societies have figured out how to make it work via subsidies, public housing, price controls, etc.

There’s the TVTropes page someone linked, which has a bunch of stuff everyone believes because they became common audio/visual shorthand in TV and movies.

Here’s a specific one that we are told about history: that we work less than our ancestors did thanks to automation and labor-saving devices. Truth is that the period of history (granted I’m talking specifically about European history) where people did the least amount of work per year was probably the middle ages (the other top contender for “least work required to live” is hunter-gatherer societies), until right before the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution sees people go from working for about half the year to working through the entire year, and from having relatively slow schedules to absolutely brutal ones. Kids went from working half days (when they worked at all) to working full time, and the compensation everyone got bought them fewer luxuries than their grandparents had when they were literally peasants.

There’s been some clawing back of our lost free time in the past century - and without modern productivity many of the things we take for granted simply wouldn’t exist - but we’re still pretty deep in the red compared to back then, and of course there are plenty of places in the world where working conditions are still comparable to the worst times of the industrial revolution. I’m not a “Retvrn” guy but I think this bit of context regarding modern work culture compared to the ten thousand years preceding it is something everyone should know, but that our society constantly paints over with misrepresentations of what the past looked like.

I don’t agree with this “setting precedents is bad” logic. The Republicans have shown absolutely no qualms about breaking with previous precedents and setting their own, so why should the Democrats? From our POV this is just an indication that the collapse of US institutional legitimacy might proceed slightly faster than it was before, but it in no way alters the course that the political system has been taking since the neoliberal turn.

Very cool article on an aspect of math that I’ve never thought too deeply about before 👍

Finally playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I played it during Early Access and that made me uninterested in playing the full release, but I’m glad I went back to it because it’s really, really good.

All of the best games ever made have been janky as hell. Highly polished games are usually that way because they avoided doing anything interesting and just did things that had been figured out by previous games.

I like all three of those games, but calling SMO “half Kirby and half Banjo-Kazooie” is incoherent to me. Bigger maps don’t make your game more fun, go too big and all you’ve managed to do it make it more tedious to get from point A to point B. Also, kirby’s power ups don’t work the same way SMO’s do - almost every SMO powerup changes the way you interact with the game world, whereas a kirby powerup just gives you new ways to dispatch enemies (which was already trivially easy).

SM Wonder is good but not quite at the high bar achieved by Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze or Rayman: Legends

Yes. Also everyone should be required to learn how to use a slide rule before they ever get given a calculator - I think that seeing how the numbers relate to each other on a physical device can help students conceptualize them better.

you sit at a red light. a bicycle passes you on the side of traffic. you grow obscenely, irrationally angry and vow to get all bike lanes removed from your city. the traffic gets worse.

Yeah this particular piece of data isn’t gonna go on top of my list lmao. Major corporate audits like this also frequently find that they’re not culpable for child labor when they are, shit like that.

Uhh, let’s see, Oh! They sold their merch on their friends’ website, which included books that were blatantly plagiarizing Roosh V!

Hang on that doesn’t narrow it down either.

I think you meant to say “Deck” in the second paragraph.

But yeah I totally vibe with your observation. Something a bit ironic with this situation is that a big part of why other companies simply can’t provide the kind of service Steam does is copyright issues - XBox and Playstation both give out free games, Nintendo has their online service, but no option remotely compares to “make everything available on one app on the most modern device.” Imagine if Nintendo put everything that had ever appeared on the Wii/DS/Wii U/3DS/Switch shops all on one online storefront on the Switch, and let you attach ownership to your account and play everything you owned on the most recent device - then they would have about a quarter of the functionality that Steam has on the Deck, where you have access to every game you’ve bought for PC for as long as Steam has existed (and quite a few things from before that) and the number of things that have lost compatibility is pretty low.

That’s true of a lot of different drugs and treatments, but harder than it sounds.