RedEye9 wrote on May 24, 2022, 21:02:

Cyanotetyphas wrote on May 24, 2022, 20:53:
Love Cronenberg. The more absurd and out of touch the better.

Scanners was the bomb. 🤯

Videodrome is superb. More relevant today -- in the age of social media and inescapable internet connectivity with all the attendant distortions of our cognition, behavior, and even perception of reality -- than the 80s.

Razumen wrote on May 23, 2022, 10:01:
Sounds like your projecting bud, absolutely no one has ever said that about the random cameo that's easily missed and not even a major point of the movie, which had a lot of other things going for it than some cool throwbacks. If that's enough to ruin a movie for you, that's your problem alone, no one else's.

I bet Spider Man No Way Home left you in a pile of tears in your shower.

When I saw that in the theater, the audience cheered at "You'll be dead" guy: it was blatant and obvious fan service meant to trigger a pavlovian response in the lowest common denominator because Disney accurately judges its nerd-product (i.e. Star Wars and MCU) audience to be composed of morons and man-children. If you think that was subtle and allusive, god help you. In any event Rogue One has nothing going for it as a movie aside from raw spectacle.

And I haven't seen an MCU movie since Iron Man. I have a rule: if it's thematically simple enough to be fully understood and appreciated by an 8 year old, then it's not worth one's time unless one is actually a child.

Razumen wrote on May 23, 2022, 06:31:
So fan service in a movie is bad?

Yup, if you like that crap, you have bad taste. This is a hill I will die on, and any movie, even one that wasn't particularly good, that would twist this particular knife earns at least my lukewarm approval on that basis alone. "OMG I recognize that: I know what that is! I'm so special for having seen... Star Wars!" That eliciting that sort of facile sentiment is the basis of most of our contemporary popular culture is as strong a signal of aesthetic decline as one can muster.

/rant

Hardline Mike wrote on May 22, 2022, 11:48:
It seems to me all the meaning is right there on the surface. Matrix Resurrections is blatantly a meta commentary on needless sequels and nostalgia. They make no attempt to hide it.

Precisely this. Resurrections wasn't much of an action movie, but as a satire of contemporary popular culture it was kind of brilliant: if you're the kind of movie goer that got really excited when the "You'll be dead" alien showed up in Rogue One, Matrix: Resurrections is mocking you and your tastes.

Anti-maskers also seem remarkably incapable of understanding the concept of probability and that there exists a continuum of values between p=0 and p=1. I'm pretty sure they're just being intentionally dense to shield their fragile egos from cognitive dissonance, but on the other hand they may just be a stupid as they behave.

Riahderymnmaddog wrote on May 2, 2022, 13:04:
For real? Is this dude a troll?

Seriously. His complaints seem to be:

1. You need appropriate A/V cables.
2. Depending on the model of TV, you may need a remote.

Uh, yes? What planet are you from, sir, where such things are not a consideration of TV -- any TV -- ownership?

Personally, I love my CRT and will take original hardware any day over rereleases of retro games for modern systems. It's only going to look like you remember it if you play it on a CRT, and likewise the control latency will be effectively 0.

Necrophob wrote on Apr 27, 2022, 17:57:

I still have nightmares of those damn dungeons. It was always something like "Find the feather of infinite tickling in the dungeon to the west of town!" Ok, shouldn't be hard, right? Wrong I still hear those dungeon doors opening with a horrible squeal. Being killed by something due to the horrible combat mechanics (surely I can hit a damn rat?! ARGH!).

Since they're all glued together out of the same collection of stock parts, and because those stock parts have subtle variations across dungeons, and because the dungeons are so large and labyrinthine that they are completely disconnected from any sense of being a physical place, you're constantly battling a felling of deja vu and that you're losing your grip on reality. "Wait, this door led to the stairs to the maze with *shudder* ancient vampires, but now it opens to a brick wall?" Opening the automap, with its clusterfuck of a camera and limited draw distance, often just serves to trigger utter despair more than it serves as a navigational aide. You know its bad when a common strategy for tackling this crap is to leave a bread crumb trail of dropped items so you can tell where you've been, and how to get out: oh yeah, getting hopelessly lost and trapped in a dungeon and having to abandon a character because you forgot to make a save at the entrance is totally a Daggerfall rite of passage.

In retrospect, I have no idea what appealed to me about any of this.

ShakaUVM wrote on Apr 26, 2022, 21:43:
Daggerfall is the best Elder Scrolls game of all time, I super wish they'd do a cosmetic remake of it, without removing functionality. It had the largest world, the best magic item crafting system, the best spellcrafting system, and so forth, in all of the Elder Scrolls series, and was released in the mid 90s.

It's certainly unique and ambitious. Also completely broken with truly nightmarish dungeon design. Nevertheless, it's almost hypnotic to play, and I'm somewhat ashamed to admit I've finished the main quest (well both of them) three times.

Ant wrote on Apr 26, 2022, 18:31:
WET was fun!

Yeah, it was superb and completely free too. Probably my very favorite multiplayer shooter: I miss objective based attack/defend multiplayer and have no idea why it stopped being a thing.

Task wrote on Mar 31, 2022, 12:18:
Honestly I wouldn't mind having the multiplayer portion playable too, since I never tried the PS2 one. The idea of co-op in a Singleplayer Half-Life setting always seemed like an untapped idea. I was always fascinated by the idea of what other things were happening or other people were doing when Gordon was off trying to stop all this, and who else managed to survive (in this case Collette Green and Gina Cross).

An unmodified PC port of the Decay campaign has existed for six or seven years now and can be played single or multiplayer. If played single player, you switch between the two characters with a key press and the unused character just stands inert, so in that respect it’s limited but you still could see play through the “lost” HL1 campaign.

The Flying Penguin wrote on Mar 25, 2022, 11:55:
Oh I'll watch this when it's released. Yes, ST The Motion Picture has it's problems, but I still enjoy it. I did enjoy the previous remaster, so this is just icing on the cake.

Same. It’s one of the better Trek movies in my view, much more in keeping with the emphasis of the show and science fiction in general. It’s also got some still stunning visuals, a real sense of wonder and awe with respect to the alien ship, and a genuinely tense and interesting Kirk-Spock-McCoy interpersonal dynamics. Of course the enterprise only fires it’s weapons once, and not even in combat, so it gets treated as “boring” by the broader fandom. And the 70s Trek uniforms look weird.

I’m not a driving game enthusiast but I’ve really really really enjoyed my time with the game. The service outage occurred in the middle of the work week, and on a night where I had something on my social calendar: I didn’t find out about it until after it had been resolved. Always online single player is shitty, as are micro transactions, but afaict the latter are only remotely necessary if you’re trying to complete your Pokédex fill every slot in your garage.

Mr. Tact wrote on Mar 15, 2022, 21:44:
Wait I'm confused, wouldn't the fact they don't know the difference be an indication they wouldn't care? But whatever. I hope you are wrong. Unfortunately, you might not be.

I’m suggesting they don’t understand what they’re asking for and therefore are more likely to be confused and or upset when they get it.

It reminds me of a recent quip regarding political attitudes in the United States as manifest in public polling:

“Do you want outcome ‘x’?” Yes 78%, No 22%.
“Do you support taking the actions necessary to achieve outcome ‘x’? Yes 32%, No 68%.

jdreyer wrote on Mar 15, 2022, 21:16:
We all work from home now, so dark or light when we wake up, doesn't matter.
How has AZ coped all this time.
/s

AZ has coped because they’re on standard time year round. Once this law goes into effect, they will be on daylight savings time year round.

Honestly, the fact that folks struggle to tell the difference between daylight savings time and standard time, and ask questions like “which is the one that makes the day longer?” does not fill me with confidence that this is going to be anymore popular than the last time this was tried.

Mr. Tact wrote on Mar 15, 2022, 21:03:
Changing the clock twice a year is ridiculous. I hope you are wrong about it failing after passing as it did in the 70s. What we have been doing is insane.

I mean you can look it up? This was tried in 74, everyone hated getting up hours before dawn all winter, businesses and institutions started shifting their operating hours forward on an ad hoc basis creating confusion and frustration, and the whole thing became so unpopular that it was repealed by late February iirc. But now that everyone has forgotten all of that, surely if we try it again it will be a smashing success!

Acleacius wrote on Mar 15, 2022, 15:26:
BREAKING—a bill to make Daylight Savings permanent just passed the US Senate by **Unanimous Consent** (S.623: Sunshine Protection Act

Daylight savings time in the winter is going to be ridiculous. Fortunately, given the experience the last time we tried this in the 70s, we will probably only have to do it for part of one winter.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Mar 8, 2022, 01:07:
Snip

That's some stark nihilism. If you genuinely think humanity going up in smoke is no big deal or even preferable, then you ought to apply the same thought process to whatever is bothering you about Ukraine: it's merely shitty humans that are dying.

A few quick responses:

* after the past two weeks it is clear that Russian military readiness is crap, and that surely extends to their nuclear arms. But even a single successful launch is almost certain to cause more death and destruction in a single flash than we've seen in sum over the past two weeks. If more than one launch is successful, which is likely even if the nuclear exchange is "winnable", then things rapidly become apocalyptic.
* we don't know what the state of public opinion in Russia is. People in authoritarian states tend not to be completely honest when a stranger calls on the phone and asks them to put on the record their thoughts about the ruler. We do know that tens of thousands of Russians have been arrested protesting the war, in the face of violence and imprisonment. And the cops doing the beating and arresting are being paid in a currency that is rapidly becoming worthless in an economy facing genuine shortage concerns. I do not think revolution in Russia is imminent. But the conditions are now in place such that something has to give. The last time a Russian Czar mismanaged a pointless, mass casualty war while letting his people suffer under profound economic privation, well, it didn't end well for the Czar. It's not like there are no parallels or precedents here.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Mar 7, 2022, 16:09:
At this point, Russia is gonna Russia and it is painfully obvious that the West is only going to assist in oblique ways even though Putita has said the sanctions are considered declarations of war. You have old ladies clutching their pearls because Russia has nuclear ICBMs even though Russia admitted in 2018 that the AABMDS site in Romania could take out whatever Russia launched in the initial stages of flight. Which means that Russian ICBMs would never leave Russian airspace. Were they overstating to lull the West in to a false sense of security? Possibly. Is staying up all night worrying about it while doing nothing and watching a fascist slaughter thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of civilians including women and children a worthy position? I don't think so but I am not in charge.

So, might as well "lie back and think of England".

What about the Russian nuclear subs and strategic bombers? Is this Romanian anti ballistic missile system going to intercept all of them?

The West is hardly doing nothing: it's fully backing Ukraine with materiale, money, and intelligence, and has in a stroke destroyed the Russian economy and set in motion domestic political concerns, both popular and oligarchic, which pose a genuine threat to Putin's continuance in power. Putin is paying a catastrophic, possibly existential, strategic cost for his invasion.

I understand that it is painful to watch Kharkiv and Mariupol and Irpin get bombarded and raped by the Russian Army. It is even harder when the half-assed incompetent showing put on by the Russian military makes it clear they could easily been ground into paste by NATO. But escalating this war into a NATO v Russia conflict, particularly without any Article V grounds, would be interrupting an enemy while he is making a mistake. Those domestic political problems that may unseat Putin? Those go away the moment this becomes a NATO v Russia conflict. The unified western response? That too goes away without a clear Article V justification.

And yes, a NATO v Russia war is far, far more likely to go nuclear than the present Ukraine v Russia war. The price we could very well pay for enjoying the satisfaction of seeing the Russian army obliterated by NATO is a cornered Putin, facing the collapse of his military and imminent regime change, pressing that red button. And I say this without any desire to be mean, but if you think being worried about a strategic nuclear exchange is pearl clutching, then you are not being serious. Nuclear war is the most serious fucking thing humanity can contemplate, primarily because most of humanity won't be around to see the other side of it, Romanian anti-ballistic missile system or not. Shouting "damn the ICBMs" in this context, is pure gorilla chest thumping, a fear/anger-based animal dominance display, which is not going to carry you very far once the permanent end of human civilization has been set in motion.

Two weeks ago I was supportive of a (fantasy) US led NATO intervention because I thought A) Russia would achieve rapid but horrifically violent military success, B) the Western response would be weak and disunified, and C) Putin would achieve a great strategic benefit for minimal, sustainable cost, completely undermining the post-WWII rules based liberal international order. However, none of those things, except the horrific violence, came true. The Russian military has shown itself wrecked by corruption and incompetence, and its maintenance budget very clearly paid for the oligarch yachts that are now being seized. The Western response has literally instigated a financial crisis and great depression in Russia. Putin's continuance in power is now in doubt. The rules based liberal international order has held. Now we need to ensure that Ukraine can win in the long run, and this war doesn't escalate beyond its current scope.

There are far, far worse things than what we're seeing in Ukraine right now. It feels shocking and awful only because we have lived in a historical bubble for 75 years. But what we're seeing now, in the scope of the history of civilization, is normal. Most human societies have been ruled by autocracies. Most ruling autocrats have been men like Putin. Pointless wars of aggression have been the norm, not the exception. Living in a city under siege used to be something most people experienced in their lifetime. We are fortunate to have lived in a time where all of this feels shocking.

That's why it is imperative to preserve the rules based international order, which the events of the last two weeks largely have done. What remains is to ensure the war stays at its current level of escalation. Advocating for a NATO intervention merely rescues Putin from his mistake, and drastically raises the risk that civilization itself, and most of humanity, comes to a sudden and irreversible end.

Holy shit, I had thought this game had been completely forgotten. In fairness, it’s trash: a noble but 100% failed experiment that probably should never have seen release. Still cool to see my main 1997 Christmas present brought back. The CTF was kind of alright as I recall.

RedEye9 wrote on Jan 2, 2022, 11:32:
What do you do to get around joy-con drift.

Do you use aftermarket controllers? If so, which ones do you like?

I’ve had good luck with the OEM joy cons. My left launch pack-in joycon developed minor drift after three years of use, but Nintendo RMA’d and replaced it. I’ve had no other issues with joycon drift.

My only real controller complaint is that the dpads on both the joycons and the pro controller are not great. The joycon dpad is precise but doesn’t do smooth movements: think a hadouken in Street Fighter II. The pro controller can do smooth movements but isn’t very precise: spurious up and down inputs when pressing left or right are common. Fortunately, the wireless SNES controller that Nintendo sells works very well for dpad based games.