dual_sport_dork
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
- Comment on Half Life 3 2 days ago:
I sort of get it, but also “Half Life game ends with G Man time-freeze BS and a random unresolved cliffhanger that will not be resolved for years, if ever” isn’t exactly an unexpected outcome for anyone who’s interested in Half Life.
You may as well just watch a Youtube LP of Alyx anyway, since I imagine the majority of players do not have the equipment to play it themselves.
- Comment on Half Life 3 2 days ago:
If the cliffhanger at the end of HL:2 Episode 2 annoyed you, the one at the end of Half Life: Alyx will annoy you even more because it not only returns to that moment but the G Man uses reality warping shenanigans to overwrite what happens in it, and replaces it with a different cliffhanger.
Son of a bitch and his unforeseen consequences, indeed.
On the bright side, this also circumvents the need for the original events of Half Life 3 to happen, since Valve has consistently said they were not willing to make it as it was originally drafted (especially now since Marc Laidlaw leaked/released the entire plot online). So now I guess they’re free to do something new with the story direction… Whatever that might be.
- Comment on Could wastewater plant simply heat up water past 500C to decompose all chemicals and output clean water? 4 days ago:
Not only that, but given that heating up volumes of water is basically the metric around which energy units and calculations are all derived, it’s easy to determine just how much energy.
Assuming an inlet temperature of a fairly optimistic 60°F or 15.56°C, it takes 12,934,470.48 joules to heat one US gallon of water to 500°C. Or if you prefer, possibly because you’re an American used to reading your electricity bill, 3.59 kWh to heat that gallon. Just one.
The EPA estimates that just in the US alone, wastewater plants treat 34 billion, with a B, gallons of water per day. No need to get out your calculator, that’s 122,060,000,000 kWh or if you prefer, just under 11.5 times the existing average daily power production of the entire country (10,640,243 MWh, if you’re wondering).
So, uh. Yeah. Probably not feasible.
- Comment on Game preservationists say Switch 2 Game-Key Cards are ‘disheartening’ but inevitable 4 days ago:
And I also have a VR headset and VirtualBoyGo if I really feel like giving myself an authentic headache.
- Comment on Game preservationists say Switch 2 Game-Key Cards are ‘disheartening’ but inevitable 4 days ago:
People also lost their shit over the PSP Go being digital distro only in a physical handheld console, and lost their shit so hard that Sony of all people walked it back with the Vita and built cartridges back into the spec. (And it became retroactively excusable once it was discovered how easily the PSP/Go could be hacked, and suddenly the Go was the desirable model for emulation and, er, backups. But that’s neither here nor there. Under its intended use, within its original lifespan, it was a stupid idea.)
If you ask me the entire point of a game console is to be a dedicated platform that you stick games in and it always works. If I wanted to fuck around with downloadable only content, games that are only keycodes, always-online DRM, and the inevitable day the servers all go dark I’d just game on PC. Which, come to think of it, in these modern times is exactly what I do anyway. I have game systems dating all the way back to the Atari VCS which I can to this very day if I feel like it slap a cartridge or disk in and they play. To me, there is immense value in that. Without that, there’s really no need for the “real hardware experience” for me. I can just emulate if any title comes out that I truly give enough of a shit about that I must play it.
So I have zero interest in the Switch 2, and thus it will be the first Nintendo console in history I don’t own, or aim to own (I do not have a Virtual Boy, much to my shame and embarrassment.) I imagine I’m not the only one. Nintendo’s been trying very hard to lose the plot, which for a company as profitable and famous as they are takes a real concerted effort. Congratulations to them, then, if that’s the goal – What we are witnessing here is very possibly the beginning of the end for big N.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 1 week ago:
Your video player “can” account for latency if you configure it correctly which I imagine the majority of people don’t do, and simply put up with it. Ditto with your music playback always lagging 1-2 seconds behind your control inputs. I have never used a media player on any platform that automatically figured out audio latency. Maybe the iDevices do if you pair them with Airpods, I don’t know; I don’t own anything Apple and I never will.
It also matters for music production, and makes life a lot more pleasant for audio/video editing. Plus, latency is just annoying in any setting.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 1 week ago:
And also no latency. Even expensive Bluetooth headphones and earbuds have crap latency. The systems that don’t are either proprietary and not widely supported (e.g. aptX) or expensive 'phones-and-dongle arrangements that must always travel in a pair and still don’t compete on latency with a pair of dollar store earbuds.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 1 week ago:
We’d love to, but manufacturers keep trying to force them down our throats. And when we express a different prererence or use case a bunch of trolls feel the need to pop out of the woodwork and tell is that no, we’re actually wrong and our use cases don’t actually exist.
How about you all don’t worry about what headphones other people wre using?
- Comment on Don't worry about it 1 week ago:
Zoomer Parker will not lug around an SLR camera in the next reboot; he’ll simply be a drone operator.
- Comment on Happy Easter from the POTUS 2 weeks ago:
Based on the popular trope of Hispanic guys hanging around outside of Home Depot (or other American big box hardware stores) every morning looking to get picked up as day laborers.
- Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing 2 weeks ago:
I’ll bet you it does, but you’ll need to put a new battery in it.
- Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing 2 weeks ago:
I bought it on Dealextreme back in the day, which was kind of the precursor to our current Aliexpress/Wish/Temu/Shein arrangement. It’s therefore possible that it is a knockoff (or a knockoff of a knockoff?) but the fact remains that it was absurdly cheap, is fully mechanical, and against all expectation and reason it continues to function and also keep pretty good time. It’s actually just a hair fast, and requires me to knock a minute off of it about once per week.
If you’re not squeamish you can get a thoroughly generic – or perhaps heavily “inspired” by some particular name brand – wind-up timepiece from any of the usual suspects for pocket change. $10-20, and other poster in here mentioned they bought theirs for $5.
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 2 weeks ago:
There probably actually isn’t an alternative. Whatever piece of software you might otherwise use to encode or convert video is probably using ffmpeg behind the scenes anyway.
- Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing 2 weeks ago:
Nice. It is astounding what you can get for just a couple of bucks, and even more astounding that they genuinely work.
- Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing 2 weeks ago:
I just took a look. They do still make quite a few mechanicals but they have indeed shot up in price. $80-90 nowadays, it seems.
My old one is definitely mechanical. I wind it up every morning.
- Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing 2 weeks ago:
It’s also approachably yet suspiciously cheap. I think I paid $20 for this close to 15 years ago, and Sinobi is apparently still at it making mechanical watches in the $30 range.
This one does two things: Tells you the time, and does so while not needing batteries.
- Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing 2 weeks ago:
If we’re doing watches today, here’s what I’m rocking lately.
I stopped using my Garmin smartwatch because they finally fell into the enshittification trap and recently tried adding AI slop and a subscription scheme into their watch app. That’s a big old nope from me, dawg.
- Comment on Given how paintball guns work, could you swap paintballs for a waterballs? 2 weeks ago:
Marbles are too inconsistent in diameter and most of them are too small for paintball guns, and certainly wouldn’t chamber or feed right. What’s more likely is that these punks were using one of the myriad crop of nylon or aluminum “jawbreaker” ammo sold online these days specifically for use in paintball guns.
In addition to the dubious legality of this sort of thing if you actually did light somebody up with a hopper full of them, for anyone considering these for deterrence of ne’er-do-wells in the night, I’d give it a second think only because mostly what you’ll accomplish is holes in your drywall and denting up your own stuff.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
We had to constantly remind people not to leave their disks on top of the monitors in those days, because on some models the degaussing pulse was enough to erase a floppy disk.
I was also proud of my ownership of a large speaker magnet which had a highly directional magnetic field, and could cause tube monitors and TV’s go all paisley from about 20 feet away. I kept it stuck to the back of my steel garage door when not in use to keep it well away from all monitors, disks, and tapes.
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 2 weeks ago:
It’s a great trio of games (Legends 1 and 2, and the Misadventures of Tron Bonne) with quite a bit of depth and if you ask me a fantastic art direction for their time. The one thing I will say is that the controls did not age very well. You get used to it after a while. These games predate modern dual-stick movement and aiming and use the shoulder buttons for strafing. I think the Playstation versions are superior due to the increased number of buttons available on the controller.
- Comment on 'Oh god': There's a buried Steam help page that shows how much money you've ever spent on the platform, and you may not want to know 2 weeks ago:
It is now. It wasn’t at first.
It was part of the Valve Orange Box and that was a big deal at the time. There was also a huge deal of whining from people who paid for it when Valve announced they were changing it to a free to play model.
- Comment on Given how paintball guns work, could you swap paintballs for a waterballs? 2 weeks ago:
Sure. But even if I were the pigs, I think I’d find $80/5000 more palatable than $400/500.
I think most of their simunition crap is .43 or .40 caliber anyway. I’d doubt too many serious operators are doing force-on-force training with hobbyist .68 caliber markers.
- Comment on Given how paintball guns work, could you swap paintballs for a waterballs? 2 weeks ago:
I find MCS’ comment about “for applications where you can’t afford case after case of paint” to be especially hilarious here, given that these are consistently damn near a buck a shot even in their bulk 500 round pack, (80 cents a shot in that case) but you can nab a 5000 round crate of top flight Valken Grafittis for $80.
Anyway, I use reballs for testing marker or fucking around in my garage since they don’t mark anything unless you put a dent in it, and they can… often… be located again afterwards, washed, and reused.
- Comment on Given how paintball guns work, could you swap paintballs for a waterballs? 2 weeks ago:
As others have stated, this is indeed already something that exists.
I’m here to go on record to point out something that most people seem not to know about paintballs, which is that their “mess” is intentionally made of materials that are washable and readily water soluble, for obvious reasons. I’ve seen a lot of hyperventilating coming from certain individuals over the years about youths supposedly being able to permanently vandalize things at a distance with paintball guns and therefore they should all be banned. This is fiction. Rest assured that anything paintballs will do to your stuff can be cured by simply rinsing it down with your garden hose.
(This is obviously notwithstanding suitably motivated individuals from rolling their own ammo out of whatever-the-hell. A paintball gun will dutifully send downrange anything round and roughly .68" in diameter, with varying degrees of success depending on the density and/or fragility of the object in question.)
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 2 weeks ago:
To be fair, they haven’t managed to put out a whole hell of a lot that’s actually compelling in the intervening years that weren’t rereleases. “Hey guys, DAE remember Resident Evil 4? The good one? We just re-re-re-released it. And some old Megaman games you already have. Full price!”
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 2 weeks ago:
Megaman Legends 3.
“We cancelled it because the fans didn’t show enough interest or act like they wanted it badly enough!”
I think a sizable fraction of the world’s population is still salty about that, and it’s been 14 years.
- Comment on American Truck Simulator is adding a road trip mode where you drive different vehicles, 'say, a powerful pickup or even a sports car' 3 weeks ago:
Definitely not. Test Drive Unlimited 2 leaps to mind, which while it certainly had racing events and racing related content in it, you could also just drive around doing nothing in particular as much as you wanted.
There are several other racing oriented games that nevertheless had open worlds and you’re never actually forced to race anybody in any of them, albeit usually at the expense of sacrificing any game progression and thus having a rather limited vehicle selection. Need For Speed Underground 2 and Forza Horizon, for instance.
- Comment on Proton 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, just wait until you get a load of the number of things called “One.” Here’s a hint: It’s a lot more than one.
- Comment on How likely is it that Trump will be the first President assassinated since Kennedy? 3 weeks ago:
Broadly yes, and also including private sales. I will however point out that you can buy a long gun (rifle or shotgun) from an FFL dealer in a state other than your state of residence provided the item you purchase is legal in your home state. Handguns in this situation must be transferred to an FFL in your home state, however. The former you can take with you, the latter you can’t.
- Comment on Give me your fucking money 3 weeks ago:
…No.
