dual_sport_dork
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
- Comment on Trying to find a messenger bag at Amazon 3 days ago:
Every dipshit with a freshly minted MBA thinks they’re going to go and disrupt the appliance industry by putting it online and snatching it out from under all those antiquated local dealerships run by out of touch old men who can barely operate a computer. They think they’re going to go from zero to nationwide tomorrow, and they’re so smart because nobody’s thought of it before.
It turns out that dealing with the final mile with appliances is killer, and extremely difficult logistically. That makes the entire operation much more expensive than anyone thinks at first glance. Not just in terms of raw dollars and cents paid to disinterested common carriers to move your product from A to B (who also won’t install the stuff or even bring it inside your customer’s house) but also in damaged and returned products and angry screaming customers who will be initiating credit card chargebacks all the time whenever anything goes wrong.
All of those little local dealerships have had decades to figure out how to move a refrigerator from their warehouse to your kitchen and how to remediate the situation if it all goes pear shaped on delivery day, and all of them only service their local territory for a reason. The further you stretch without some physical presence in where you’re stretching to, the more impossible it becomes to control the logistics.
So yeah, that’s probably in no small part why your fridge would have been so expensive. Amazon is among the latest figuring this out the hard way, and you can’t just slap a refrigerator or a stove in a bubble mailer and dump it on somebody’s front porch.
- Comment on everyone talks about chip bags being 50% wasted space but no one talks about creamed corn cans being 50% wasted space 5 days ago:
Chip bags are full of air to protect the chips from being crushed in transit.
Your corn is full of… uh, whatever it is that’s in there with creamed corn in order to protect your corn. Obviously.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Optimus Robot shuts down after reproducing the gesture of its human operator removing their headset 5 days ago:
There’s a singular perfectly awesome use case for a robot you can drive as your proxy. Here it is:
Of course, the chances on Elmo being able to deliver anything even approaching this minimum level of usefulness are well into the negatives.
- Comment on Well, it’s funny if you can read Egyptian signs! 1 week ago:
Right above Dat Boi is the Distracted Boyfriend meme.
Given the look on its face, the owl may be an O Rly?
I’m drawing a blank on the egg and its army, and the guy in the group of four with the nice hat.
- Comment on Karl Bushby: Made a bet in 1998 that he could walk from Chile to England. 27 Years later, Still walking. Survived Darién Gap, 57 days in a Russian prison, Traversing the Bering Strait on shifting ice 1 week ago:
It’s also an incredibly stupid bureaucratic clusterfuck of the magnitude that only customs and border people can achieve. Surely there should be some mechanism wherein you can send a letter or something to the Russian authorities to inform them, “Hey, we’re trying this stupid stunt and here is our plan, let us make our declarations now and we’ll pick up all the paperwork on the way once we get there.” But there probably isn’t, and then you wind up with crap like this.
The tinniest of tin-pot jumped up little dictators are never to actually be found in your nation’s capital. Instead they’re all lined up along its borders acting like these various lines in the sand were laser-etched there by god and aren’t ultimately just arbitrary and, indeed, historically much more fluid than they’d like to pretend.
- Comment on Where are the arms bearers? 1 week ago:
Who wants to be the first to martyr themselves getting turned into Swiss cheese after firing the first shot? Is it you? Why not?
That is your answer.
- Comment on Fresh dystopian hell from Samsung fridges with ads. 1 week ago:
Equip a sensor that figures out how much ethylene is in the air inside the fridge?
Or just open the door every once in a while and look…
- Comment on Fresh dystopian hell from Samsung fridges with ads. 1 week ago:
And the ultimate outcome of that was, at one point Google enacted some kind of API change which necessitated Samsung to push out an update to remain compatible, otherwise all of your Google enabled features such as the calendar syncing, email, etc. would stop working. Samsung claimed to be developing a patch for this, and ultimately pushed out an update to… only some of their models. For the others, their response was literally just, “We recommend you buy a newer refrigerator.”
But since that was going on for ten years ago now, information about it on the Internet is a trifle difficult to find because the search results have largely been overshadowed by Samsung’s more recent smart fridge fuckup. Grand.
Never buy a Samsung appliance.
- Comment on Fresh dystopian hell from Samsung fridges with ads. 1 week ago:
…To the manufacturer. The retailer’s not going to take it back, and even if you did manage to bully them into taking it somehow that’s still allowing the retailer to shield the manufacturer (i.e. Samsung) from the consequences of their actions. And consequences are what Samsung needs to see over this.
- Comment on THE ULTIMATE GAME tm ℠ ® © Pat. Pend. 2 weeks ago:
You yadda-yaddad a homie stock? You can’t yadda-yadda a homie stock!"
- Comment on We need to normalize not captioning single image memes, so everyone can reuse it. 2 weeks ago:
Are we still doing “Oh, exploitable?”
- Comment on Another angle of this modern art installation 2 weeks ago:
It is, but none of the four bus drivers have all of the information. You will also need two or three cops or at least guys in fluorescent vests to physically block traffic from entering the circle and or bitch-slap selfish asshats as necessary until the Gordian knot of buses is untied, otherwise said selfish asshats will try to barge into the intersection the second the first bus moves and start everything all over again.
- Comment on Settings you believe ANY game should have? (This is me advocating for a restart/reboot button on ALL games) 2 weeks ago:
Given I’ve never seen that actually become the case even in games with engines I had to apply configuration hacks to increase the FOV, I find all of that highly unlikely.
- Comment on Settings you believe ANY game should have? (This is me advocating for a restart/reboot button on ALL games) 2 weeks ago:
performance implications
That might be fine for consoles which have known performance limitations built in. But if I’m on my PC, let me make that decision. Don’t try to make it for me.
- Comment on Settings you believe ANY game should have? (This is me advocating for a restart/reboot button on ALL games) 2 weeks ago:
I’m glowering hard at No Man’s Sky’s permanent chromatic aberration effect applied to the top 20% of your viewport at all times, here.
- Comment on Settings you believe ANY game should have? (This is me advocating for a restart/reboot button on ALL games) 2 weeks ago:
One of the latter Final Fantasies did this. I think it was 13? Despite that game’s many other rather glaring shortcomings, that part was pretty neat. I agree it should definitely be standard for most RPG and heavily story driven games.
- Comment on Settings you believe ANY game should have? (This is me advocating for a restart/reboot button on ALL games) 2 weeks ago:
All controls should be remappable. All means all. Not most, not some, and certainly none of this bullshit where all you can do is toggle between “XBox 360 controller layout A/XBox 360 controller layout B.” This is especially true for titles on consoles, many of which still to this very day don’t allow you to remap their controls at all.
For 3D games, field of view. Far too many developers of FPS titles in particular have Console Disease, and feel it’s somehow acceptable to lock the FOV to 70° or some absurd number. If they allow you to adjust it at all they may be feeling “generous” enough to let you go as high as 90°. That’s completely unacceptable. On my 4K monitor that’s 25" from my face, I need at least 120°. Honestly, I want to see that slider go up to 180°. That’s right, I want to be able to look at your game world like a goddamned pigeon. On that note I really have to wonder what those people with those 3840x1080 überwide monitors do most of the time, other than spending their days in never ending torment.
Allow me to turn off the stupid pre-launch splash titles. Certainly at least after the first startup. I certainly don’t need to be told that nVidia is the way it’s meant to be played, or that your company licensed Havok, or who your publisher is, or who your publisher’s owner is, or who your publisher’s owner’s owner is, etc. Nobody cares. Usually instead you have to resort to replacing the .mkv or .bik files in the game folder with zero-byte text files or something. It’s dumb.
While we’re griping, and speaking of Console-Itis, does every PC game now need to have an unskippable message telling me that this game has auto save and urging me not to turn off my PC when the icon is being displayed? Really? Nobody’s going to do that. Tell me your game is a shitty console port without telling me your game is a shitty console port. To keep this on topic, let’s have a setting to turn that off, too, because it’s stupid. Off by default would be nice. Should there be an Idiot Mode toggle?
Granularity in subtitles. It seems too many games only have two settings: All subtitles off, or they assume you’re completely deaf. Typically I want to be able to read what characters are saying in their voice lines, but instead the developers also think I need to see the bottom third of my screen filled with [BOOM] [GUNFIRE] [JUKEBOX MUSIC] [FOOTSTEPS] [BOOM] [GUNFIRE] [BOOM] [BOOM] and so on and so forth, all the time. They should either categorize sounds and make their subtitling things individually selectable, or at least if they insist on making it a slider give it three or four levels: Off, cutscene/conversation dialog only, all spoken lines (“Cover me!” “Reloading!” “Never should have come here!” etc.), and then only the top level resulting in every single cricket and rustle of grass being captioned. Some games do manage to accomplish this. Many do not.
Oh, I thought of a good one to add to my wish list. I want every game to bring back the sound test menu. But they won’t, because every studio on Earth now wants you to spend an extra $15 for their game’s soundtrack. (As if it’s not all going to be on Youtube about twelve seconds after release anyway…)
- Comment on The story of a crazy Half-Life 2 bug, as told by former Valve dev Tom Forsyth (Mastodon thread) 3 weeks ago:
You can deflect leaping headcrabs this way (or block them with a held object, although this causes you to automatically drop it afterwards) but as far as I know it deals no damage to enemies.
- Comment on The story of a crazy Half-Life 2 bug, as told by former Valve dev Tom Forsyth (Mastodon thread) 3 weeks ago:
Apparently Valve experimented with melee weapons early in development, but intentionally decided to cut them because of the perceived lack of impact and weightlessness of held items, but the main thing was that playtesters kept getting their long melee weapons snagged on stuff. Alyx notably does not allow your hands or held items to intersect with other objects, nor does it let your hands get too far away from your body’s position to prevent shenanigans. If you unexpectedly hook your crowbar on a door frame or a table or something you’ll find yourself inexplicably leashed to it after walking a couple of feet and then not be able to find your hands.
This article goes into some detail. Apparently the crowbar specifically was removed to prevent players from assuming they were Gordon Freeman, despite the constant stream of evidence to the contrary. But it doesn’t seem like too much of a leap to replace that with Alyx grabbing a random length of pipe or chunk of rebar or something from the multitudes of trashed urban environments she traverses throughout the game.
Anyway, as soon as modding support was opened up for HL:A the first things that inevitably appeared were about 4,987 mods that added the crowbar back in. So it’s an easy enough wish to fulfill, if that’s what you want.
- Comment on The story of a crazy Half-Life 2 bug, as told by former Valve dev Tom Forsyth (Mastodon thread) 3 weeks ago:
I like this one:
Also, whacking the manhacks with your crowbar goes from being a panicked flailing in flatscreen, to being an elegant one-swing home-run hit in VR.
It makes me like the fact that there are no melee weapons in Half Life: Alyx even less, though.
- Comment on Evolution at its finest! 3 weeks ago:
Be sure to stick an AR500 plate between your saddle and the mine as well, so you can enjoy a free added speed boost when you flak your enemy without scorching your buttcheeks.
It’ll totally work. I saw it in a cartoon once.
- Comment on Evolution at its finest! 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Posted directly, no. Not anymore, anyway; there was a bright and shiny albeit very short period early in .world’a days when you could upload a video instead of an image and it would take it and work. I imagine the admins disabled this for obvious reasons.
You can still post an animated .gif, though. I do it all the time.
- Comment on If Microsoft ended Windows 10 support, why is it still getting updates like every other day? 3 weeks ago:
Pro or Enterprise? Or even better, Enterprise IoT LSTC? The latter is going to get security updates until 2032.
And those enrolled ($61) in the Extended Security Updates program get one more year of security support (not feature updates), and the various Enterprise versions will continue to get updates for up to another seven years, depending on the version.
Microsoft didn’t stop updating Windows 10 and they won’t for quite some time. They’re simply no longer offering those updates to most users of the consumer versions of Windows.
Windows Update can also hand you updates to your drivers independent of the support status of your copy of Windows. For instance, if you install a copy of Windows 7 even today it will still pull driver files from Microsoft.
- Comment on Me when Valve releases a phone 4 weeks ago:
Steam Deck: Already runs Linux.
GabeCube: Confirmed it will run Linux.
Steam Frame: Confirmed it will run Linux.
Obviously Valve has made no overtures whatsoever towards making a phone. But if they did, what on Earth would lead you to believe that it wouldn’t run Linux?
- Comment on Uh oh: Ubisoft postpones its quarterly financial report at the last minute and halts stock trading 4 weeks ago:
Or consistently fail to make Beyond Good and Evil 2 for several decades.
- Comment on Happy Day to all who celebrate 4 weeks ago:
It’s from the Watchmen comic:
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 4 weeks ago:
It could be either given that Alyx ended on a cliffhanger that ties it back to the original series. They’d better come up with something, or else they’re going to have another riot on their hands.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 4 weeks ago:
It was pretty janky. I received a download code for Half Life 2 in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro several months before the game was actually released. I didn’t have a lot of use for Steam before then, but I installed it anyway and my account is so old that back when the account IDs were still numeric and sequential, mine was four digits.
- Comment on Valves first title with a 3 in it 4 weeks ago:
I still have my boxed copy of the Orange Box on a shelf. It still sees use because every once in a while I get embroiled in a Kids These Days type of conversation and I need a prop to wave around.
