dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

My account is so old I have (or had, before they normalized the format) a four digit steam ID. I “owned” Half Life 2 for like four months before it released thanks to getting a code free in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro back in the day. For a short and glorious flash of time in the summer of 2004, I was guaranteed a copy of the most hotly anticipated game ever, even though nobody could play it yet, and also owned an example of the fastest video card on the planet. Damned if I didn’t mow a fuckton of lawns and reinstall Windows and Outlook an a horde of septuagenarians’ computers to afford that card.

And no, they do not stop asking about your age.

Neat, but.

Even HL: Alyx left us with just as much of a cliffhanger as the end of HL2 Episode 2…

As for why: I have no idea! Maybe just for user familiarity reasons, since a lot of people grew up with that kind of analog feedback that the antenna wasn’t getting a signal.

This is exactly why. Preventing screen burn-in may be a tiny peripheral reason also, but providing a familiar experience to chronically myopic and cranky users (i.e. boomers) is probably the bigger one.

The trope of video/audio breaking down into static is an easy shorthand that is unlikely to be forgotten, probably even well after all the devices capable of doing so have long since been buried in the landfill.

It’s especially hilarious in media depicting the far-flung future, where apparently all technologically advanced space men and their communications devices – not to mention high powered central supercomputers and so on and so forth – somehow still work over NTSC television signals. Even by the early 1980’s it should have been entirely predictable that in “the future” anything like that would be digital, considering we already had widespread digital audio media (CD’s), and digital video was already making inroads into the computing industry.

Tube TV’s remained in common service well into the 2010’s. The changeover from analog to fully digital TV transmission did not happen until 2009, with many delays in between, and the government ultimately had to give away digital-to-analog tuner boxes because so many people still refused to let go of their old CRT’s.

Millions of analog TV’s are still languishing in basements and attics in perfect working order to this very day, still able to show you the cosmic background, if only anyone would dust them off or plug them in. Or in many retro gaming nerds’ setups. I have one, and it’ll show me static any time I ask. (I used it to make this gif, for instance.)

In fact, with no one transmitting analog television anymore (probably with some very low scale hobbyist exceptions), the cosmic background radiation is all they can show you now if you’re not inputting video from some other device. Or unless you have one of those dopey models that detects a no-signal situation and shows a blue screen instead. Those are lame.

Shallow Thought Of The Day: Any game mentioned in this thread twice is automatically someone who didn’t read all the comments before posting.

Especially because certain aspects of the storyline are random on each playthrough. Who is and isn’t a replicant is not always the same, nor is how certain characters will react to the same dialog questions on subsequent runs. Depending on how the cards fall, this arguably also includes you.

Yes, I still have this on all four original CD’s.

I had this as a kid. From a shareware compilation CD.

For the Gen-Z kids in the audience, that’s like a little snapshot of the internet that you bought at a computer show or flea market for $2, and was worse than the internet because it didn’t have any boobies on it, except it was better than the internet because your parents wouldn’t gripe at you constantly for always tying up the house’s telephone line and you barely had to wait to play anything on it.

Where was I again?

Oh yeah. I got my ass kicked by that game. It was also cool that you could set any Windows .ico file as your player character, though. You could run around as Captain Notepad or Sir Calculator the Algebraic if you wanted to.

Commander Keen

Only if you never watch CV-11.

That’s the neat part: I don’t.

Not anymore. I scaled back my fast food consumption quite a bit in previous years, but when the prices of everything skyrocketed to absurd levels during COVID I just quit going to fast food places and never looked back. I get Taco Bell or something like, maybe two or three times a year now and that’s usually when I’m on a road trip or something. Otherwise they can get bent as far as I’m concerned.

If I want slop it’s cheaper and honestly also easier to just buy a TV dinner from any of the selection of general goods stores within walking distance of my house and pop it in the microwave. And these days probably faster, too, because I don’t have to deal with the McAttitude or inevitably discover that the fast food place is trying to run with half the staff it’s supposed to have because its franchise owner is a greedy prick, nor have to worry about getting sucked into the thrice-weekly fistfight in the parking lot, nor getting caught in the crossfire because some fuckmuch is salty about not getting enough ketchup packets and decides to shoot up the joint.

Here’s the problem with that, though. It’s not going to be like there will be roving goon squads going from door to door snatching away your wives and daughters or anything. Even the MAGA-heads are just barely clever enough not to form themselves into any kind of entity that you could physically fight.

Instead, they’re going to chip away at everybody with asinine laws and legislation, selective enforcement and remote harassment, by filing mountains of frivolous lawsuits, etc. They’ll seize property. They’ll get you fired from your job. They’ll kick you off of your health insurance and freeze your bank accounts. Those responsible are never going to actually expose themselves in any capacity in which they can get got, because they’re cowards; they’re going to hide behind their desks and layers of security and fences and metal detectors and cops and the secret service. If it turns to outright violence vis-a-vis war in our own cities, it would be monumentally stupid for them to send troops marching down the street, and they won’t. They’ll just remotely bombard an entire city block and blame all the collateral damage on “leftists” or “wokeism” or whatever. And idiots will believe it, and then blame the victims.

“That’s ridiculous,” you say. “The government would never bomb anyone on US soil.”

You want to bet?

I once heard it also involves a miserable little pile of secrets.

…And emissions valves, vacuum hoses, evap canisters, fuel cap/seals, possibly a valve cover gasket, serpentine belt, tensioner, and idlers, fuel filter, possibly the fuel pump. 500,000 kilometers is 310,685 miles for all the Yanks and Brits in the audience, and if you manage to drive a combustion car that far without needing all of those things, let alone any selection of them, I will eat my distributor cap.

CIVIVI knives are generally pretty legit. Trust me, I can go much more mall ninja if you like.

This leaps to mind.

Knives are prohibited

Tru fax, I am never working where you do, ever, so long as I live. I’d melt like the Wicked Witch of the West, I’m sure.

Gee, for the same money… a digital brontosaurus for Orc Game that you need to pay a recurring subscription to actually use, can be taken away from you at any time, or one day the servers may simply be turned off erasing not only your “investments” but also your years of “work.” Or, I don’t know, a CIVIVI Hyperpulse with a groovy pattern welded blade that also happens to be a physical object you can actually hold in your hands and keep forever. Just to pick something out of a hat.

What a tough choice!

You can just send 'em back and buy something else. Amazon will take any damn fool thing back.

We could only hope.

Shout out to B&H. I bought my drone from them, and they offered the same model bundle at a slightly lower price than Amazon and also offered next-day shipping for no charge.

They also have a physical retail store and real live people you can call if you have a question, unlike either winding up talking to a chatbot or being redirected to Mumbai after a 45 minute hold.

I don’t know these guys from a hole in the ground other than that, but they beat Amazon and that was good enough for me.

If your site did not call visitors a flak monkey at least once I will be sorely disappointed.