dual_sport_dork
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
- Comment on The Ol' Switcheroo 2 days ago:
- Comment on Why does dried pasta have an expiration date 4 days ago:
Unless it’s vacuum sealed it will absorb water from the air and eventually go kind of manky. I don’t know how it is in all parts of the world, but most pasta here other than the exceptionally fancy stuff is just packaged loose in cardboard boxes that are in no way airtight.
If you stuck your spaghetti in one of those vacuum pumped storage containers to get all or most of the air out of it, it’ll probably last until the heat death of the universe regardless of what the packaging said on it.
- Comment on This is my boomstick 4 days ago:
Handy note: This is real. Something very much like it, anyway.
- Comment on Flirtation 3 4 days ago:
She’s taking a flash illuminated picture through the plughole, which is shining on his face. He is what’s living in her sink.
- Comment on good idea, no downsides 6 days ago:
The problem is that there are very few well built appliances anymore, even among the expensive options. Some catagories just have no option that’s competently designed and manufactured at all, from any brand.
You are correct that adjusted for inflation/portion of yearly average income, appliances used to be proportionally much more expensive, though. Manufacturers could afford to build them to last back then.
- Comment on Interesting bathroom design 6 days ago:
Truly, the throne.
- Comment on good idea, no downsides 1 week ago:
Modern ranges/stoves do this also, and some of them even have the concrete blocks bolted to the outside where you can see them. Albeit on the back.
- Comment on GOG seemingly shares that they are considering physical PC 'big box' games. Maybe? 1 week ago:
Consumer burnable CD and DVD disks often have an astonishingly short storage life, especially if they are not stored very carefully. They’re not an archival medium. Competently pressed commercial (aluminum) disks meanwhile have a storage life that is near as makes no difference to infinite provided they are not physically damaged in some way.
I’ve got tons of burned disks of pirated old games from the early aughts that don’t read anymore. This is highly annoying from a preservation standpoint as I can’t get them to play despite possessing them on disk, and they’re now unpopular enough that they’re likewise difficult to impossible to pirate again.
- Comment on GOG seemingly shares that they are considering physical PC 'big box' games. Maybe? 1 week ago:
Who the hell has a built-in CD player or even a BD-player in this time and age?
The answer is nerds. The specific answer is the type of nerds who would buy this sort of thing.
You’re looking at one right now, in fact — I have an internal 5.25" Blu-Ray burner in the lone singular bay in my current case. (The machine with the conga line of nearly every type of floppy drive ever created down the front of it lives in the basement.)
- Comment on The end of civilization costs $5 1 week ago:
To get clear ice you have to freeze it slowly, basically just at the freezing mark (32°C/0°F) which is a warmer temperature than most people have their freezer set to. It’s not difficult in an objective sense, it just requires rubbing a couple of brain cells together and a tiny morsel of effort which is apparently more than a lot of people can muster.
- Comment on 50 Iconic Vehicles From Video Games 2 weeks ago:
I twigged to that immediately, also. Canonically according to the Internet the Arwing is supposed to be 28 “sm” long in its SNES incarnation and 18.5 of them thereafter, only raising the question of what the hell the “sm” is as a unit and how that translates to real world ones. But assuming that Fox and his furry pals are roughly the same proportions as humans, the way the Arwing is consistently depicted is with a single seater cockpit that one of them fits in to handily, roughly analogous to a real world fighter jet. Thus we an assume they’re about the same proportions. So, like 18 to 20 meters long, which makes Star Fox’s units (maybe they’re “space meters”) seem pretty comparable.
I think the Arwing’s on the wrong page, here.
- Comment on #StopPayingGames 2 weeks ago:
I feel like President Skroob and his luggage, here. This encapsulates what’s already on my own ban list nearly verbatim. Incredible.
- Comment on Remember your fallen heroes 2 weeks ago:
That was one. He, uh, rather made a habit out of it going forward after that.
- Comment on From Harvard graduate to the Unabomber 3 weeks ago:
He wrote a rather infamous screed on the topic. The thing with the bombs was to force the newspapers to publish it.
- Comment on You can (not) turn this worksheet in late. 3 weeks ago:
Get in the robot, Shinji.
- Comment on Just another "we are all going to die" prediction 5 weeks ago:
And it’s tough to remember just how fast computing was changing in the '90s, improving by leaps and bounds all the time with seemingly no ceiling in sight. Consumer computing power was doubling every one and a half years. And in, say, 1994 it wasn’t unreasonable at all to assume that all of that crusty old tech from the '80s and even early '90s surely would have been replaced by the year 2000 anyway without anyone having to do anything special about it. Probably more than once… right?
The crucial disconnect there was that tech people are not necessarily business people and I think a lot of folks grossly underestimated management’s recalcitrance in spending money until it was more than clear they were facing a crisis.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Current “classic” Doom is generally played at a much faster pace overall than in the DOS era anyway, now that auto-run is a thing and the assumed default for many WADs and maps, and the majority of people are at minimum using mouse aiming and also probably mouselook.
2016 felt pretty spot-on by comparison. Eternal and its restrictive ammo capacities and “you must defeat this kind of monster exactly this way” bullshit got tiresome very quickly. Evidently nobody was brave enough at the time to tell id that if the discoverability of your gameplay mechanics is such that you feel you have to yank the player away into a dream-sequence arena to tutorialize at them with the One Approved Way to defeat that type of monster, your design is bad.
I could feel the block and parry thing in Dark Ages getting old before the trailer was even over.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
2016 is the superior game of the three. If you only had to play only one of them, I think you wound up making the correct choice.
Eternal had some highly questionable gameplay design choices made about it and I have no idea what the fuck Dark Ages is supposed to be doing or what anyone thinks it’s got to do with Doom. It’s begging to have a new setting and IP made for it. And in fact I suspect (with zero evidence) that this was the original intent before some suits got involved and insisted on slapping the Doom trademark on it for the brand recognition, or whatever the hell.
But it’s Bethesda, and now they’re owned by goddamn Microslop of all people. So I’m not buying Dark Ages at any price, DLC or not, and not especially how they did Mick Gordon dirty the way they did during the development of Eternal, and et cetera and so on and so forth. Fuck 'em.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I can think of few stewards worse for Doom and it’s legacy than Bethesda and fucking Microslop.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Another sequel of something called “Revelations?” Doom has officially jumped the shark, hasn’t it?
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
There is (was) rather infamously a mod for Morrowind which removes the fog. Said fog was required to conceal the render distance limitations of the hardware of its time, but these days basically any random computer can render the entire Morrowind map in one go which reveals that in fact it’s smaller than Disney World. Morrowind has the smallest map out of any of the Elder Scrolls titles to my knowledge, and it’s surreal to see all the towns and landmarks all nestling practically shoulder to shoulder like that.
Skyrim does an excellent job of making its lands look vast, but the geography is similarly compressed. The climb from lush valleys to frozen windswept peaks is only something like the equivalent of a two thousand real world feet, which wouldn’t even qualify as anything more than a foothill to the Rockies here in reality. The Throat of the World which is canonically supposed to be the tallest mountain is actually only 766.5 meters or 2514 feet tall in map scale terms, which isn’t even a third of the way to breaking the treeline in most places.
- Comment on there's a Costco at the other end 1 month ago:
Neat, but this is off scale by a factor of about two thirds. Central Park is roughly half a mile wide which means at typical spacing you should be able to fit 330 parking spaces per row. Let’s call it an even 300 to be extremely charitable with the aisle down the middle and access ways down both sides. I counted 93 or so (it’s a bit muddy) spaces in the closest row that’s not clipped by the edges of the frame.
So not only did some asshole pave over Central Park, but apparently it’s being exclusively used for monster truck parking.
- Comment on 👴☝️I did that 1 month ago:
Very few of the ones around me have the built in ad players. Several stations blare ads (inevitably largely for themselves, curiously enough) over the PA system constantly, though.
The ZIP code thing is for credit card verification. I ask for that too, when you pay me by credit card. I don’t have a choice unless I’d like to enjoy zero fraud and chargeback protection.
- Comment on Accepting Cookies 1 month ago:
And,
- Comment on Is there an "Avoid Amazon" community for people who want to support smaller online retailers? 1 month ago:
You can have a good laugh at Grainger’s prices on just about everything. They exist purely to rip off other businesses with large expense accounts, in the “don’t care, it ain’t my money” tradition.
- Comment on Day 673 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing 1 month ago:
That, and the leviathans become a total non-issue once you get the stasis gun. You can find the blueprint fragments in fairly safe and easy to reach places (albeit in a somewhat RNG dependent manner, I believe). A fully charged shot freezes one in place for a full 30 seconds. An uncharged shot nails it there more than long enough for you to make the next one a fully charged one. Then you can either knife them to death trivially or, if you’re a weenie, simply swim away.
- Comment on 60% of PC gamers have no plans to build a new PC in the next two years — AI pricing crunch on RAM and other components paralyze enthusiast market 1 month ago:
Sure, but I built my previous rig in 2012 and kept it in service up until I put together my latest one just at the end of last year. Even with the best will in the world I had absolutely no intention of building yet another new gaming computer any time in the next two years regardless of geopolitical fuckery.
- Comment on How is RAM size measured? Why doesn't it match the marketed size? 1 month ago:
Unlike hard drives and SSDs which as you have observed are incessantly manufactured in powers-of-ten mega/giga/terabytes but marketed as if they were powers-of-two mebi/gibi/tebibytes, a RAM chip’s capacity is absolutely, definitely, 100% down to the individual bit precisely the capacity at which it is rated in powers-of-two megabytes. Due to the way that memory is accessed there is no other way and it cannot be fudged. (The exception is ECC RAM which typically has an extra bit per byte to hold the parity data, but this is not accessible to the user so that’s moot.)
There is a small bite of your memory space taken out for Memtestx86 to reside in, which is necessary in order for it to run. Your BIOS probably has some portion of memory reserved as well, either for peripheral memory mapping or for use as video memory, or similar.
There is probably also some rounding going on in the total capacity that Memtestx86 reports.
- Comment on Even if we found a feasible way through physics to travel through time, wouldn't it still be impossible due to the evolution of bacteria and our immune systems? 2 months ago:
Before you even get to that, the point everyone forgets is that if you’re using the typical type of zap-and-you’re-in-dinosaur-times method of time travel as invariably imaged by fiction, the planet will be in a very different place in the universe from where you are right now if you travel to any time. Even just a few seconds, in fact.
You’re going to have to come up with one hell of a hand-wave to cover how your location stays glued to some particular spot on the Earth’s surface even as you’re whizzing off decades or centuries into the future or past. It’s probably not even good enough to mumble about local frames of reference or what have you, because there is no such thing as a truly global frame of reference (because what would it be referenced to?) or even static spatial coordinates in the universe. If the simple Newtonian movement of the planet/solar system/galaxy/etc. doesn’t get you then the universe’s constant expansion probably will.
You might want to bring some oxygen and a very fast spacecraft with you.
- Comment on socializing 2 months ago:
You, uh, realize that’s really not the dis you think it is, right?
- Comment on socializing 2 months ago:
You’ll have to eat the insulation foam if you want to go around getting high on cyclopentane. Or maybe smoke it.
