We used to have a chain of stationery stores over here that had shitloads of stickers. They went bankrupt. Now I have no idea where to get stickers from. Except the Internet, of course, where I can pay up my nose for a few Linux / programming stickers from stores that disappear and reappear. Buying stickers as an adult suuuucks here. I don’t know how the kids do it.

I had a rad cloak for my Hunter. They sunsetted it. Why was I even playing from then out.

Hngh. Balatro already had a bunch of hassle on Switch eShop due to the PEGI ratings change.

Earlier, Nintendo somehow got a PEGI 12 rating for 51 Worldwide Games, which includes poker and blackjack. I wonder what they argued to avoid the 18 rating. “Sure, this compilation has poker and blackjack, but it’s not like we made it fun.” (It’s adequate but compared to Balatro it’s very much a non-frills experience.)

I remember using CDParanoia on Linux and some GUI for it (Sound Juicer?), CDex and Exact Audio Copy.

I’m always discombobulated by JWT because I keep thinking it’s some kind of Java web technology.

I have them on CD-ROM.

I also think I have the final patches for them on floppies that I stuffed in the boxes. Not sure if they’re readable (or in fact the final patches)

[old woman memories mode]

I remember registering my CD key of HL1 on Steam and was surprised when they gave me the expansions for free. Cool, because I didn’t have them.

I remember buying The Orange Box on Steam. I remember it because Steam gave me a warning because I already had Portal - it was free at some point. Was a bit miffed when TF2 went free to play later on.

And I somehow still haven’t played HL2 on Steam, I think? I played it about 1/3 way on Xbox 360. Played the shit out of Portal on 360 though.

I tried to reupload the full 600 DPI scan but lemmy.world decided to start coughing - though I don’t think uploading it at higher quality is worth it, as the 2000px wide version is already pretty representative of the original.

I think the full PNG is already of printable quality. If you really need it in PDF format for some purpose or other, I recommend just grabbing the PNG and converting it. I may see later if I can convert the 600DPI scan to PDF though.

A solid game in its current state. Probably one of the best games of the decade for me, just not in top 5. Has that “once you start playing, suddenly it’s 3 hours later” factor. Extremely atmospheric world design. Lots of great writing too.

Now, it does have the annoying thing that it sometimes keeps reminding me of games that did some aspect better. For example: Vehicle physics feel completely hokey. (“Man, I wish I was playing Saints Row 3/4”) Can’t really go exploring everywhere, would have loved to explore more rooftops and such. (“Man, I’ve got to get back to Mirror’s Edge”) Not exactly a prime stealth game in accordance with the laws of the art form. (“Man, Deus Ex was the shit, got to play it”)

Most recent time I was awestruck by a thunderstorm in a game? Forza Horizon 5. One of the early missions involved heading out in the jungle during a massive thunderstorm and it was just legendary. Visuals, audio, everything.

It’s a tale as old as the game industry itself: The company releases an okay game, everyone goes “hell yeah, a solid 7/10”. …except by now everyone expects the company to make nothing but absolute masterpieces.

It’s an okay game with lots of little janky bits I don’t like (surprising in sense that I of course expected there to be some jank, this is Bethesda we’re talking about). The game seems to be amusing enough that I enjoy my time while playing it, but it doesn’t have the magic sauce that would make me eagerly get back to the game the next day.

I was politically ambivalent as a young voter.

Now, I’m pretty much convinced the rich people (and the parties that represent them) are just out there to screw everyone else over. And every single year just adds more evidence to the pile.

I don’t think there is any conceivable scenario in which anyone can convince me that free market will magically fix all problems. It’s nonsense.

/mnt is meant for volumes that you manually mount temporarily. This used to be basically the only way to use removable media back in the day.

/media came to be when the automatic mounting of removable media became a fashionable thing.

And it’s kind of the same to this day. /media is understood to be managed by automounters and /mnt is what you’re supposed to mess with as a user.

Yeah, the biggest tragedy of technobros pushing generative AI everywhere is that as a result of that, everyone just had to adopt the stance that you can’t trust a damn thing these days.

At least previously, this kind of disruption led to nuance. Photo manipulation has been around pretty much since the dawn of photography, so now we as a society have developed nuanced view of it over the past couple of centuries. Now, photographs used as evidence in criminal cases have different standards than photographs used in advertising - former has strict standards because it’s a serious inquiry requiring hard evidence, the latter has lax standards because the viewers understand that the photos offer an “enhanced” truth. But generative AI? It just got dropped on our lap all of sudden. We as a society can’t deal with it yet. We’re not ready.

Sorry I just had coffee

I’ll get YouTube premium once they fix their damn TV app.

• If I resume playing a video from history, it often plays the ads, then re-plays them shortly after. (You know, at the point when it hit me with a fucking 55 second ad and I backed out and said fuck no, are you shitting me. Double points if the ad it tries to play again is also ridiculously long. I just keep refreshing it until it gives me 5 seconds to skip. I’m not much of a gambler, but this much I can gamble.)

Admittedly, this bug is not applicable to Premium. Being ad-skippy and all. But it’s indicative of the overall quality of the app. For example:

• When long-holding a video in all circumstances, I it should give me a full menu. Like, with the “go to the channel” option? …doesn’t give that to me in Subscriptions view. This might come as a surprise to YouTube, but I don’t always like watching Whatever The Algorithm Feeds Me. I might, you know, choose to watch the 10 episodes I missed. To do that, I need to actually like to go to the channel in question.
• …Or any of the channels I like or are particularly interested at the moment. There’s no way to pin this shit either.
• Speaking of which, the fucking way to browse my subscriptions is fucking atrocious holy shit. It’s useless. This is Google. They don’t do user experience research. They half-ass everything.
• On my smart TV, sometimes the buttons just fuck up. Sometimes I can’t control this shit. Because my TV operating system was designed by particularly deranged people, they thought “closing” or “restarting” any given app was space technology that no average consumer can understand, so they reduced that to bare minimums: the only way to restart the app is to pull the plug. This is just fucking demeaning.

A collaboration between Google and Samsung, people! Two giant corps serving millions of users! And they expect us to pay monthly fee for this holy shit

…sorry for the rant.

I have three of them, and I’m still struggling!

I can’t do the thing! I’m in middle of doing this other thing! Yeah it sucks that I can’t do the thing, but when the hell am I going to get around to do that thing? “Oh you can do it whenever, it takes so little effort—” No. Shut. Up.

Ah!

Now let us never discuss it if we can help it.

Well, the whole point of NaNoWriMo is to produce a viable first draft. Some of these are so far removed from final draft it’s not even funny. None of these drafts are good enough to be accepted by editors at publishing houses, sadly. …No matter if we’re operating in the ideal sphere of literary merit or the actual crass sphere of marketability publishers respect.

I’m currently struggling with my literary projects. I can whomp out a 50,000 word novel every November in NaNoWriMo, no sweat… but it’s been over a decade now and I really need to get to editing at some point. Shit.