dual_sport_dork
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
- Comment on My only response to Discord 2 days ago:
As any night club bouncer or liquor store clerk knows, ZIP code 12345 actually resolves to Schenectady, New York.
- Comment on PROTIP 2 days ago:
I carried my Schrade Switch-It every day in the little seam pocket of my carpenter’s jeans (as was the style at the time) and the only flak I ever caught for it was one day the principal spotting it and telling me he didn’t want to see me with my “pager” at school anymore.
I told him he had my scout’s honor that he would never see me with a pager so long as a lived. Yes, this sailed right over his head. I still didn’t get into trouble, though, which is surprising given the sheer variety of other stupid and highly spurious things that somehow got me in trouble in school.
- Comment on PROTIP 2 days ago:
- Comment on All fight no flight 6 days ago:
I don’t think I’ve ever been in a meme before.
- Comment on Anyone old enough to have used this before GPS? 1 week ago:
I have seen guys do it, though. I suppose in certain specific scenarios it might make sense. I’m in agreement there, though, I think I’ll give it a pass unless I absolutely have to.
- Comment on Anyone old enough to have used this before GPS? 1 week ago:
For anyone wondering what the heck this thing is, it’s called a roll chart. Usually these are loaded with turn-by-turn instructions for rally racing or similar, but as you can see you can also stick a map in one.
If you’re going to do the map thing it kind of helps for your overall route to be oriented vertically, or else otherwise you have to stick the map in it sideways.
- Comment on Anyone old enough to have used this before GPS? 1 week ago:
It’s a map in a roll chart holder. These days they’re used in rally and off road racing, and sometimes motorcycle touring.
- Comment on What's with companies naming things "MyNoun"? 1 week ago:
I can confirm this to at least some degree. Part of my job involves marketing and this unfortunately requires at least some minimum peripheral contact with professional marketing people.
They’re idiots, at least on the creative side. They live in a bubble of their own making and are among the worst people on Earth for predicting how regular people think, interact with products or websites, or make decisions.
However, they also get piles and piles of cash shoveled in their direction by executive types who are also idiots, in the vain hope of an ROI that is legendarily fuzzy and also extremely easy to fudge. Thus, the machine churns on.
- Comment on London stabbing rates vs X posts about London crime 1 week ago:
Agreed.
Also, if everybody has a knife, the cartel that slaps those impossible-to-tear plastic collars over the necks of bottles of salad dressing and soy sauce will no longer hold any power over us.
- Comment on London stabbing rates vs X posts about London crime 1 week ago:
And while we’re at it, un-ban all the silly things that they used your baseless hysteria as a purported justification for banning.
Knives for everybody! All shapes and sizes.
- Comment on How would you spell the sound Transformers make when they transform? 2 weeks ago:
As usual, this is thoroughly documented to a perhaps ridiculous degree on the Transformers Wiki:
tfwiki.net/wiki/Transformation#Onomatopoeia
There is an official answer to this question. It’s Transformers; of course there is an official answer to this particular question. Actually, there are several. Jury’s out on which of these interpretations in particular have caused the franchise to be Ruined Forever, but surely at least one of them has.
- Comment on smh 2 weeks ago:
I’m convinced that the majority of whinging about metric in the US is actually coming from old machine operators tucked away somewhere in the industrial sector who don’t want to give up their old decimal inch Bridgeports and Shipleys, or have bosses who wouldn’t buy them new machines anyway. Everything else stems from there, bubbling on up through the pipes as it does.
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 3 weeks ago:
More or less, yes. That’s also why it appears more red/orange as it gets closer to the horizon from your perspective, since at that oblique angle the light has to pass through more of the atmosphere to get to you and more of it gets scattered or absorbed by particulates in the air.
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 3 weeks ago:
The question is how gradually. Over the span of 10,000 years, probably not. Over the span of a month, absolutely. Remember that the hue of sunlight already changes significantly throughout the day based mostly on the sun’s proximity to the horizon (and thus how much thickness of crap in the atmosphere it has to plow through to get to your location) and we can definitely detect that easily.
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 3 weeks ago:
We perceive the sun as white. That’s a fairly important distinction.
The reason we perceive the sun as white is surely because the sun has output basically the same spectrum as long as humanity (and a great deal of humanity’s precursors) has existed. We evolved with our eyes considering the spectrum the sun kicks out as fully white light, comprised of the sum total of electromagnetic frequencies we’re able to receive with our eyeballs.
There is no such thing as objective color of any light. Our understanding of color is completely based on our perception of it. If the sun’s peak output were in the 590–625nm range (what we currently perceive as orange) for all that time rather than in the green part of the spectrum it is in reality (500–565nm), we undoubtedly would have evolved to see that particular spectrum combination as white light instead.
All of the above notwithstanding, if the spectrum output of the sun changed overnight like OP’s idiot friend is suggesting, it would be immediately apparent to everyone who isn’t literally blind.
- Comment on Invest now before it's too late! 3 weeks ago:
Jest, perhaps. But you can already buy copper bullion for “investment” purposes the same as you can do with gold and silver:
www.jmbullion.com/copper/copper-bars/
This is, of course, for the express purposes of parting fools who listen to too much AM talk radio from their money. Copper is worth, what, a little under $6 a pound right now? So these one ounce ingots in reality contain about 37 cents worth of metal.
Copper is self-evidently not an investment or speculation vehicle, unless you are able to front the money to deal with it in quantities measured in tons.
- Comment on Retail stores still selling the same overpriced junk since at least 2019 and even pretending it's on sale 3 weeks ago:
If you have to do it legitimately for corporate liability purposes then yes, actually buying licenses will not be cost effective. But activating the LTSC versions is otherwise trivially easy.
- Comment on Retail stores still selling the same overpriced junk since at least 2019 and even pretending it's on sale 3 weeks ago:
I am explicitly using LTSC.
You don’t need a license if you know about massgrave.dev. I’m only using this because our warehouse software requires Windows and the latter is already bought and paid for. Otherwise, Microsoft can bite me.
- Comment on Retail stores still selling the same overpriced junk since at least 2019 and even pretending it's on sale 3 weeks ago:
Ooh, a Celeron N4000. I will see you, and raise you this piece of shit we have at work:
My boss bought this as one of those Black Friday “deals” for about $99 USD. The sticker on the bottom doesn’t seem to reveal its manufacturing date but I believe this model was released in 2018. Really, it’s just a netbook in all but name.
We use this specifically to drive a walk-around barcode scanner in our warehouse and the software we have to use on it is Windows only. It’s tiny and still somehow gets stellar battery life, and it’s deliberately so cheap as to be disposable so when the day inevitably comes that it gets smashed, no one will care.
With Win10 IoT on it the thing actually runs tolerably for our intended use case, which is the aforementioned barcode bleeping and nothing else. And at least yours there has a 1080p display; this one is only 1366 x 768 so doing practically anything else on it is excruciating anyway. What amuses me the most about it is that with only 39 gigs of usable storage there literally isn’t enough left over to run Windows updates. I have this thing as ruthlessly pared down as I can get without creating a custom Windows installation or something and it only has 770 megabytes free on it at the moment. If you want to let it update for whatever reason, you have to attach an external USB drive to it.
I can’t fathom trying to run Windows 11 on it. Fuck all that noise.
- Comment on How can we convince Trump voters to NOT vote for Trump (or Vance) in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 election? 3 weeks ago:
People do understand what the midterms are, right?
…Right?
Neither Trump nor Vance are up for election in 2026. But quite a few of their GOP cronies are, in the house and senate. All of the house is up for election and roughly one third of the senate. This will most likely be our last chance to oust at least some of Trump’s enablers in congress.
- Comment on Nintendo Switch 2 sales stumble over Christmas 4 weeks ago:
And even in the cases when you think it might have games, it turns out they’re not on the cartridge.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 4 weeks ago:
Your example sounds like Ikaruga if it were deliberately designed to be annoying.
…We probably shouldn’t give any mobile game developers any ideas.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 4 weeks ago:
Especially the gold chests that give you a fiver. However, my gripe is with the 3-4 second delay after it goes “bling” but before it presents you the button that allows you to dismiss the popup.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 4 weeks ago:
Basically every console RPG ever. Certainly those which are not voice acted, and present characters “talking” at you by slowly ghost typing their lines out one character at a time into a text box and then awaiting you input at the end before proceeding to the next line, but inevitably with the dialog box refusing to even start listening for button presses until some seconds after I’ve read the text multiple times over, plus its partially completed form several times more.
I’m adding another dishonorable mention on this front which isn’t even a text box: That fucking treasure chest opening animation in Vampire Survivors. If you know, you know.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 5 weeks ago:
I’m always verbose. If you see that penguin knife over a post you ought to know what you’re signing up for.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 5 weeks ago:
Meta.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 5 weeks ago:
They’re almost always .bik files somewhere in the game directory. I have no clue why so many games still insist on using this specific format in particular even today, but at least it makes them easy to find. I have determined that quite a few games will barf if you delete the files outright, but if you just replace them with an empty text file with the same name it will still allow the game to launch.
Console players are usually out of luck.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 5 weeks ago:
These days I think my biggest gripe about games is those which through intentional design decisions either massively disrespect the player’s time, intelligence, or most often both. I’m looking very hard in Nintendo’s direction, here. Miyamoto says: If the player is not locked into a succession of inescapable and slowly plodding text boxes where they’re offered neither choices nor agency, it must mean they’re not sufficiently engaged!
This was marginally acceptable when we were twelve years old and had all day to sit in front of the video game console, and arguably nobody knew any better. But now gamers are adults. We have jobs and chores to do and some of us have kids, and most people have only a very limited slice of time left in the day for gaming. That time should be spent actually playing the game, not waiting for you game to get out of the way of its own damn self.
But games are now going in the wrong direction, to ever greater heights of trying to manipulate players in to make the fucking thing their full time job, either due to incompetence (in single player/traditional console games) or greed (in online/live service games).
So also cutscenes you can’t skip even after you’ve already seen them (this includes all the dumbass logos before the game actually starts), dialog boxes you can’t skip after you’ve seen them the first time as well and, definitely if you can’t press some button to cause them to skip their typing animation and simply display in full. This goes double if you were too cheap to have your game voice acted — yes, Nintendo, that means you again, see me after class — because then you don’t even have the excuse of trying to keep the text synchronized to the voice lines.
I’m a sight reader. I assure you, I can read your text as fast as you can put it on the screen. You don’t need to slowly type it out one character at a time with little scritchy bleepy bloop noises. If other people need that for accessibility purposes, fine. But let me turn it off. And if you are going to insist on forcing me to pause for several seconds at the end of each paragraph before the prompt appears and allows me to press A to receive the next text box, I’m afraid I’m going to have to hunt you down and slap clean out of your chair with this here rubber chicken.
This explicitly also includes games which force the player to grind for some critical resource or progression or need some absurd amount of in-game currency to do anything, and are clearly designed around the grinding being the point. Or even moreso if the grind can be conveniently eliminated by paying a microtransaction; in that case your game just got uninstalled. I’m also including stuff like, “You need this item to access this content, but it randomly drops and too bad for you that you need ten of them and it’s a 1/1,000 chance. Go kill more spiders. No, not those spiders. Only these specific spiders, which spawn in this specific area, but only with a 1/50 chance. The other spiders that spawn here are the wrong type.”
No Man’s Sky in particular is deeply guilty of this, forcing you to go to specific planets in specific types of systems which you often have no way of filtering or searching for to look for specific objects which may drop specific materials which you are required to have multiple of to build some object for your base/ship/suit/whatever. Let me just say, I’m glad that the item duplication bug in that one remains unpatched.
Games which force you to stop progression for a completely arbitrary reason, and for no other purpose than to be annoying. One example I can name off the top of my head here is Spiritfarer. This is a game that, by and large, revolves around doing menial chores to cater hand-and-foot to ungrateful people, all of which require engaging in some manner of real-time minigame. You do this while scooting all around the world to visit areas you need to be physically present in to trigger events in which you can gather required resources. Your boat sails itself once you plot a route, leaving you free to engage in said minigames (with varying levels of tedium) while it steams away in the background. The game has a day and night cycle. Your boat stops moving at night. You have to run all the way down the length of your boat (which gets progressively larger as you play) to go to bed in the cabin at the rear, whereupon the smarmy going-to-bed jingle can’t be skipped, wait for the fade to black, and then run back to where you were to pick up what you were doing before you were interrupted for absolutely no compelling gameplay reason. Fuck you very much.
Also,
Don’t even come at me with, “But realism! Everyone needs to sleep!” First of all, the other denizens of your boat don’t sleep because they are all dead souls. And second of all, the game can’t even hold it in until the actual ending before revealing that so are you, so it turns out Stella doesn’t even need to sleep either.
The latter complaint also includes games which insist on stopping the action dead incessantly to pop up a message box and have your mission control fairy tutorialize at you in a condescending and unskippable manner. Especially if it’s not on your first playthrough. Frankly, if you can’t figure out a way to teach your game’s most basic mechanics to the player naturally and have to resort to unskippable popup nagging, you suck and you need to find a new career. Game development obviously isn’t for you.
- Comment on I miss him and his crazy family 5 weeks ago:
- What was covered up with the smudge, and
- y u no do better job?
- Comment on My kitten loves his hammock in the bathroom window, but my neighbor's trash pile ruins pictures 1 month ago:
We already have local governments, too. What a reductive take.
