the reason half life sfx are so funny is because half life was the last game set in a realistic environment but with hanna barbera grade sound work. after that it all got boring and competent
AAA titles all immediately adopted phenomenally high quality realistic+diegetic audio, meanwhile we press a button in goldsrc and valve plays "Track 16 - Loud Button Press Beep With Click.cda"
a thing I think about a lot is security advice that's basically just wrong because it's written with assumptions about corporate behavior that are not reliable.
windows 98 asks me where to install. i choose C:\$Recycle.Bin. half an hour later i reach the desktop, empty the bin, and turn the computer off. perfect cycle. cleanest way out
surface mount electronics are exactly where we started to go wrong as a species. if we'd stopped at through-hole we'd still remember what god's love felt like
Was in staples today. shocked to discover a physical software inventory, more shocked to discover it is precisely identical to what was there in 2003, just bigger version numbers
every single queer person who sees this kind of thing feels the insincerity so deeply, because these aren't things anyone would ever say to another person, and the deafening subtext is "i don't think you should have your sense of self beaten out of you"
remember that day fourteen years ago when your computer actually felt fast for the first time and it lasted for like a year before the slowmotion apocalypse began
the only proof we need that computers are getting steadily worse is that a meme song made from Windows 10 sound effects would not be a banger. this is a stark contrast from even 10, but certainly 20 years ago.
I've long since given up on smashing my head into immovable brick walls and getting angry about the wrong things, so I won't spend any effort on it other than to say that discord forums are neither forums, nor remotely useful for any imaginable purpose, nor in any way a solution.
You really, REALLY shouldn't put your personal information or GOD FORBID your SSN into a site like THIS.
Too bad this is the ACTUAL SITE where you make payments on your Best Buy store card.
I have sad news. A lot of people knew one of my cats, Gibbs, through my videos and countless pictures. Today we had to put him down. He got very sick, very suddenly, and there was nothing else we could do to help him.
Good luck with that though. The inbound team will have absolutely no idea what you're calling about; they're in a different country, using a different account system, and have zero authority to transfer you. You won't even know who to ask to speak to.
"don't click any links in your work email from external senders, especially if they ask you to provide information" Tell the VPs at my company to stop using free web services to mailblast surveys about the company picnic to everyone then.
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I spent the late 90s and early 2000s furious at how often I had to change CDs when playing a game. Until recently, I was unaware that there was a nuclear option.
How about "if you click a link in an email sent by your bank, make sure it goes to your bank's actual web address"? That would be great advice if my bank's IT could keep all their systems within one domain; they can't, and register shit like .
My advice isn't "throw caution to the wind." I have no advice. There is no solution. We have utterly, catastrophically failed as a society to solve the problem of secure telecommunications.
So, this makes perfect sense, but:
@internetarchive
's Wayback Machine archives malware too. This malicious JS popup injected by a banner ad is apparently so old-fashioned that modern ad blockers don't catch it.
I love the bluetooth experience. Get new device. Try to put it in pairing mode. Do you just press power? Press and hold? That turns it off. Are you supposed to press and hold until it turns off, then back on in pairing mode? Is pairing mode a solid light or a blinking one?
my favorite adversarial feature of Raymond Chen is that nearly all the "screenshots" on his blog are actually meticulously crafted hunks of css. i don't know why he does this, but I assume that - like much of Windows - it's because it's Correct in inscrutable ways
It's telling that the largest number of flailing fascist hissy fits I've ever received in my yt comments is in response to me saying "calling something in your computer 'slave' is pretty gross."
Few weeks ago I went into goodwill and saw they had moved tons of shelves to create a bunch of empty space. Saw it at multiple stores. Knew exactly what was up, and I called it: they're loading up on dollar store junk, meaning they're shutting down retail and going all eBay.
sonic: chemical plant zone? heck yeah! gotta go fast
coroner: continuing, bloodstream contained 500 ppm xylene, 150 ppm unknown plasticizer agent, most likely absorbed through skin. cause of death appears to have been cardiac arrest due to calcium channel blocking, secondary t
got an email from my bank today and noticed that it came from email-<bank>.com. i challenge you to come up with *any conceivable explanation* for why the bank couldn't add this to the MX record of their primary domain. i will wait.
If you're logging into a Microsoft app there is simply no way to know what domain you'll see - you might see half a dozen. Some are incredibly stupid, like , which is *legitimate.*
Months after my *largely speculative* video about the "game sprite tapes," someone who worked on Sierra's Cyber Park shows up and confirms I had it basically right. This is pretty much what I'm in it for.
put words to a decades-old thought: the software era of 3D rendering was fascinating because it was largely... "artisanal." yes, there were *some* engines, but a lot of games, as far as I know, were either handrolled or used some unknown 3D library bought from who-knows-who
So, apparently, circa 1989-90, there was a significant market segment for PC addon cards that could convert standard VGA video to something that could be composited into a TV production. Not just a scaler, but something A Bit More Than That.
Nobody is in charge, nobody knows, companies are too big, too spread out, too disconnected, and too careful of liability. Even if they knew, they wouldn't tell you. They'll just wait a day and call you again.
People talk about wanting repairable phones but that's an incredibly complicated idea that demands a ton of compromises. My much more achievable goal: Mice and keyboards that are designed to be cleaned.
in commemoration of 4/20 let me remind you that I have 40+ videos in which I describe objects in a fairly calm and meticulous style which would be great to consume while you are completely blasted on marijuana smoke or vapor
I saw someone saying that if your bank calls you and asks for any info you should hang up and call them back at the number on your card, to ensure you aren't getting called by scammers. Good idea, phone scams are very common!
It's a very, very valid piece of advice, which doesn't work outside of a couple scenarios like routine fraud detection that actually flags your account in the system the front-end people can see. If the fraud *investigations* team calls, good luck ever getting them again.
The reality of online security is that, to the extent any of us are actually safe at all, we're mostly just feeling things out and asking "did I start at a known-safe location and only follow trustworthy internal links from there?"
the email looks like:
"Teams,
the survey link is real, everyone please take it
- dave"
and every single person in the company who sees it decides that *this* is the day when they stop trying, because what's the point.
a surprising number of homophobes are commenting on my livestream reup to let me know that they're mad at me being much more popular and more interesting than them. weird!
I put a Wii inside a BVM. Other than controllers, only needs a single power cable. It's on a modular card, so it pulls right out. No modifications to the monitor itself
Claims that a company "will never call you and ask for information" are empty promises. There are ALWAYS situations that cannot be resolved without calling someone and asking for personal info.
if you add up:
"please stop putting all the info about your game mod or open source project in a discord and nowhere else"
and:
"oh my god every tutorial is a youtube video"
and:
"all the recipe sites are fake"
the sum is:
"nobody's willing to work for free online anymore"
I can't imagine how many companies hire a security team who write up really great presentations, train everyone, and then have to sit there biting their tongue as the executives force the entire company to ignore every single word of their advice.
I can't find it now, but a couple years ago I went to log in to... my Windows user account, I think? And I got transported to an Office style login page, which then dropped me into this *bizarre* identity verification process that was full of broken english. It was legit.
Phones are constitutionally incapable of being secure. The phone company decided decades ago to allow anyone with $150/mo. to have unfettered access to set their caller ID as they wish, and that was the only possible security feature that had ever existed.
I've been mad at the Firefox history viewer for ages because it lists every URL only once, by *most recent* access date, so if you click on an entry, it pops it up to the top of the list - scrolling your view up, possibly tens of thousands of entries away from where you were.
*Non*-internet based security? Good luck. Your bank absolutely will not tell you whether someone called you earlier. You can feel smug after someone on the inbound team tells you there's no record of anyone reaching out to you but it's false security; they don't know.
A conversation I've had many, *many* times is that a tremendous number of people at businesses absolutely should not be writing customer mail or even internal memos - and for centuries, they didn't. There were professional communicators (secretaries!) who did that.
my cat passed away, my fridge stopped cooling to a safe temperature, my video projects SSD just ate shit five months after being replaced, and everyone else has it even worse. I'm announcing, effective immediately, that we aren't having any more summers. It's just a bad idea.
I will spend half an hour searching for how to do something, scrolling past 15 "WHAT'S up YOUtube" videos, any of which would explain how to do it in 8 minutes, in order to find a forum post that says "just drag the clip to a power bin"
A lot of security advice is made by people who are In The Industry. I'm sure they don't want to make "remember that your boss has no idea how to comport themselves professionally" their standard narrative. Unfortunately, that's reality
None of this matters because the actual problem is that you can't type "site:" followed by a discord server into Google, nor does internet archive store anything that happens on one. This wasn't going to fix that, it's just kind of astonishing how much worse than useless it is.
I checked with other people who had seen it before in other contexts, usually involving ADFS, there were reddit threads and stuff. It was legit, but it was also totally inexplicable and contained verbiage obviously written by a programmer and not reviewed by marcom.
I could go on a lot. He was a little weirdo, and I will miss him forever. And since we're told it was a badly infected oral tumor, I will end with a hearty: Fuck Cancer