dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Pretty much all of those are characters from franchises that quickly jumped to consoles, or had the intention of multiplatform releases from the very start. I’m not sure any of them are very fitting.

So on that note, the least nonsensical mascot for PC gaming in particular I can think of is that dwarf, whoever he is, from the box art of World of Warcraft. Or possibly the orc from the alternate version. WoW is earth-shatteringly popular and has basically defined the entire private lives of a depressing number of people, not to mention it’s the sole and singular thing even non-gamers think of when you mention MMORPGs. And it has only appeared on home computers. Never consoles. Other Warcraft properties have, but not WoW.

Define “long.” I disagree with the Doomguy proposal explicitly, because Doom appeared on the Sega 32x in November of 1994 which was barely a year after the initial PC release. One of the defining aspects of gaming in the mid '90s was the monumentally cynical gold rush of trying to cram Doom onto any damn fool console as fast as possible, in a vain attempt to capture part of the lightning and make those sales. And until the Playstation and arguably the N64, every attempt failed spectacularly in various ways.

The definitive Doom experience remaining locked to the PC for those few years was absolutely not for a lack of trying. Every greedy video game exec on the planet wanted Doom on their system. id themselves assisted with several of these ports in various ways and they had absolutely no intention of leaving Doom only on PC, either, if they could help it.

Re: But it has to be watertight, so it can’t have any ports or buttons or doors or hatches or a replaceable battery!!!

Uh-huh. Sure.

Feel free to trot this one out the next time some glassy-eyed Apple apologist is making that argument at you. That one annoys the shit out of me, too. This has been a solved problem for thirty years. Probably longer.

For anyone wondering about where, just as an example, polyvinyl is: Polyvinyl acetate (i.e. PVA) is the stuff that wood glue is typically made out of. It’s also the binder used for those bird seed bells.

…It does indeed dissolve in the water. In the rain, certainly, which any owner of a bird seed bell could tell you.

I propose the following amendment, then: If you cause harm to a two wheeled rider due to negligence and/or belligerence, you get busted down to a Vespa for a further 5 years.

In some places in the world you can give it a shot and see, but we don’t have rear fog lights in the US. I’ve never seen one on any car designed for this market, and my Crosstrek just to name an example has a conspicuous filler panel over the hole where the rear fog light goes on the same model sold in other markets.

As to why, I have no idea. But we also mandate that front fog lights can’t be configured so they can be activated without the main headlights on at the same time, which kind of defeats the purpose if you ask me. So maybe asking DOT regulations to make sense is a tall order.

Or on your motorcycle in 15.

Everyone with the usual compliment of legs should be forced to start on a motorcycle or moped. After 2 years of that we let you graduate to being in a box. Riding a motorcycle will force you to learn how to remain attentive and focused 100% on operating your machine, and when you’re finally afforded the luxury of a roof and heat, not having to get rained and snowed on half the year, you’ll really appreciate what you’ve got instead of treating it like the world owes you a car.

Update: It is day 126 and Amazon still can’t figure out where my camera is.

I know where it is. Their delivery driver stole it. (Yes, I just charged back my credit card. Their response was to send me an incredibly smarmy and condescending form email asking why, as if they don’t already know. And they lost the chargeback dispute, obviously.)

So maybe their robots won’t steal your package. They’ll just yeet it into a bush 65536 yards from your house in a random direction instead. On the bright side, you might occasionally get a package that belongs to someone else from the other side of town dropped on your lawn.

To both this and that I say no thanks; I don’t use Amazon anymore.

I take umbrage at all these popsci articles that keep breathlessly insisting that the new wondermaterial is as “strong” as steel without meaningfully specifying how. Because inevitably it only matches just one mechanical property of steel, if it even manages that (so also look out for weasel words like “nearly as strong as steel”).

As strong in terms of tensile strength? Shear strength? Hardness? Elastic modulus? Abrasion resistance?

In this case it’s compressive strength. No other properties are mentioned except weight. That’s not terribly impressive from a mechanical engineering standpoint. From a chemistry standpoint, sure. But steel – even then, there are oodles of potential steel alloys – has a rough compressive strength ranging from 500-ish to a maximum of about 1500 MPa. Big whoop. Most ceramics meet or handily exceed that, and quite a lot of them are significantly lighter than steel. So why don’t we build airplanes out of those? Because their other properties are completely unsuitable for the task, especially for large pieces. In particular they’re much too brittle.

You want to know what else has a compressive (and tensile!) strength of up to 500 MPa? Aluminum. Guess what we build airplanes out of.

I’ve held multiple times before that it possibly would have been better off if it were a more focused, linear experience possibly akin to how the newer Deus Ex games worked. Within those you had the freedom to screw around in the area/mission you were in and given a wide latitude to complete things as you saw fit, but it definitely excised the wannabe GTA filler in the middle.

2077 had an excellent series of incredibly well-directed moments, both within the main story missions as well as several notable side missions, but the stuff in between made little sense especially given the story framework of V living on borrowed time with a ticking bomb in their head. But sure, let’s save up and buy nine apartments, collect all the gold class weapons, stock your garage with all the cars, traipse all over down finding all of Delamain’s rogue taxis, do a sidequest for this random chump, see a concert, check all these cyberpsychos off our list…

There is incredible detail in the world if – but only if – you stop to search for it. There are a lot of things most players will probably miss unless they’re specifically pointed out, and while that’s certainly neat it also means that the lack of discoverability means the time spent on many of those details ultimately turns out to be wasted. 2077 is thus a weird hybrid of a linear and open world game and as a result feels both too constrained and to unfocused at the same time. It’s all to easy to get derailed, and alas to some extent you have to let yourself get derailed to accrue enough XP and equipment so you don’t get your ass handed to you if you just try to stick to the main storyline, even though that storyline is written as if it’s supposed to be a single linear narrative.

Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed the game. I just would have presented it much differently if I were in charge.

This is so. At the bottom of the article it says:

To help us give customers who use T-Life a smoother experience, we are rolling out a new tool in the app that will help us quickly troubleshoot reported or detected issues. This tool records activities within the app only and does not see or access any personal information. If a customer’s T-Life app currently supports the new functionality, it can be turned off in the settings under preferences.

So yes, it can only see itself, i.e. within the T-Mobile app. It’s still dumb.

I’m not well versed enough in Android app development to answer whether or not one userspace app can even access the screen contents of another app without root or special permissions, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are several roadblocks in that path on the part of the OS for obvious reasons.

…Just don’t look at it too hard when you go to the Great Deku Tree in BotW.

I thought at first you guys were thinking of this, and I was puzzled. Then I looked it up.

Crivens, it’s like a combination of Tempest and Flappy Bird, but since it’s a Terry Cavanagh game it’s also been whacked over the head soundly with VVVVVV.

I also maintain that Breath of the Wild was superior to Tears of the Kingdom. Apparently this opinion makes Zelda fans incredibly salty.

Journey is indeed absolutely fantastic. It finally got a PC port a while ago after languishing on the PS3 for quite some years, and its hardware requirements are probably low enough in the modern era that practically anybody should be able to experience it.

My only gripe is that online randos seem not to understand the meditation achievement, and get antsy when you try to entice them to sit there with you until the achievement pops. And since you can’t type at them you can’t communicate to them what’s going on.

I got the trophy on PS3 back in the day but I haven’t successfully wrangled anybody into helping me get the Steam achievement for that yet…

Historically a masterpiece has been a (or the) work that demonstrates an artist is capable of utilizing their medium to its fullest extent, i.e. it has been mastered. Per ye olde Wiki:

Historically, a “masterpiece” was a work of a very high standard produced by an apprentice to obtain full membership, as a “master”, of a guild or academy in various areas of the visual arts and crafts.

In that light, I’d say the best qualified would be games that completely utilized the capabilities of the platform they were designed for or, perhaps of interest to more people, expanded what everyone thought could be done with those systems. Games which were furthermore well polished and complete, and did not have much room for improvement taking into account the constraints they had to work with at the time. (For instance: No duh we could make Mario 64 run at a higher framerate and have better textures to look nicer on hardware now. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t arguably a masterpiece of its time, on the system it was on.) This doesn’t just have to be technical stuff – It could be the way the game used storytelling, its gameplay mechanics, or anything else.

Bethesda ought to just let the Doom IP go and give it to someone who actually cares.

I will never give a single red cent to Bethesda ever again and I sure as hell ain’t doing it for this. Whatever this is has no business claiming to be a Doom game. They probably would have had slightly better luck if they slapped the veneer of some other IP over it rather than Doom.

Dan did it first!

Can confirm; I used to manage a hardware store with an attached small engine repair shop. There’s a reason Briggs and Stratton abbreviates so readily to “BS.”

They’ve been trying to do the absolute bare minimum possible to maximize profits and making their machines flimsy and deliberately uneconomical to repair for several decades, now. All I can say is that we ought to be thankful for aftermarket parts.

I think we can all safely assume that EV’s are not relevant to this discussion.