CrushKillDestroySwag [none/use name]

I wanna say “my” first PC was an intel 486, with a hard drive and a floppy drive, and whatever cheap monitor/mouse/keyboard came with it from the Post Exchange. I was in elementary school so it was all a bit over my head, but my mom had gotten it for work because they were moving all of their records to digital and she didn’t want to get left behind, and I used it to instantly improve my failing “penmanship” grade at school by doing all of my homework in a word processor. I think I had a Genesis at this time so I never played DOS games much beyond the Lemmings and Dragon’s Lair demos.

My first PC was an early Celeron, and I remember upgrading it with a Sound Blaster Extigy, and then later an early Radeon. That PC later got RAM and hard drive upgrades too, I really pushed that hardware for as long as I possibly could before upgrading again, running everything at the lowest settings and just “dealing with” under-thirty framerates for just about everything from Lego Island to the first Harry Potter games. I didn’t really care though because my jam pretty much that entire decade was Starcraft, with Jedi Knight 2 coming in close second.

VLC: I’m here to help.

For both wine and liquor I find that presentation will impress people way more than price. Get a cool looking decanter and you’re basically set as far as the average wine drinker goes - as for liquor, I have a Crystal Head Vodka bottle that I rinse out and pour whatever I’m drinking into, which is a lot cheaper than buying another Crystal Head lmao.

Yooo is that a trackball? I made the switch to a trackball because I’m a giant hipster a few months ago, but mine is an index finger one, not a thumb one. Setup looks good - an XPS is definitely on my radar for whenever the Surface I’ve been using for the past seven-ish years dies, it looks so clean.

There’s the TVTropes page someone linked, which has a bunch of stuff everyone believes because they became common audio/visual shorthand in TV and movies.

Here’s a specific one that we are told about history: that we work less than our ancestors did thanks to automation and labor-saving devices. Truth is that the period of history (granted I’m talking specifically about European history) where people did the least amount of work per year was probably the middle ages (the other top contender for “least work required to live” is hunter-gatherer societies), until right before the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution sees people go from working for about half the year to working through the entire year, and from having relatively slow schedules to absolutely brutal ones. Kids went from working half days (when they worked at all) to working full time, and the compensation everyone got bought them fewer luxuries than their grandparents had when they were literally peasants.

There’s been some clawing back of our lost free time in the past century - and without modern productivity many of the things we take for granted simply wouldn’t exist - but we’re still pretty deep in the red compared to back then, and of course there are plenty of places in the world where working conditions are still comparable to the worst times of the industrial revolution. I’m not a “Retvrn” guy but I think this bit of context regarding modern work culture compared to the ten thousand years preceding it is something everyone should know, but that our society constantly paints over with misrepresentations of what the past looked like.

Very cool article on an aspect of math that I’ve never thought too deeply about before 👍

All of the best games ever made have been janky as hell. Highly polished games are usually that way because they avoided doing anything interesting and just did things that had been figured out by previous games.

I like all three of those games, but calling SMO “half Kirby and half Banjo-Kazooie” is incoherent to me. Bigger maps don’t make your game more fun, go too big and all you’ve managed to do it make it more tedious to get from point A to point B. Also, kirby’s power ups don’t work the same way SMO’s do - almost every SMO powerup changes the way you interact with the game world, whereas a kirby powerup just gives you new ways to dispatch enemies (which was already trivially easy).

SM Wonder is good but not quite at the high bar achieved by Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze or Rayman: Legends

Yes. Also everyone should be required to learn how to use a slide rule before they ever get given a calculator - I think that seeing how the numbers relate to each other on a physical device can help students conceptualize them better.

Something like Rome: Total War, but at full historic scale and with a total commitment to realism. You would need to come up with some kind of time scaling to make it manageable, but battles should play out over the course of in-game hours or even days.

Lines of communication should be important to maintain, as you can only see what your general sees and everything else on your screen is the result of reports coming in from your scouts/skirmishers. Your orders get delivered via a combination of shouting, flag and horn signals, and messengers on horseback based on the complexity of the order and the distance to the unit you’re sending it to - which of course means they can be intercepted in some cases.

The battles play out with a simulation of crowd dynamics, where casualties from weapons are pretty low but if you can cause a retreat you’ll be trampling the other army to death, or if you hit an enemy unit from multiple sides at once you can potentially cause a crowd crush that makes them unable to effectively fight back.

Massive blocks of people moving around should kick us a huge dust cloud in their wake, making them easy to spot but obscuring what’s behind them. A unit standing directly behind another unit should be hidden unless you have high-quality scouting in that area. Cavalry should almost never stop moving, since doing so is pretty much an instant death sentence, with light cavalry automatically circling and using hit-and-run tactics while heavy cav simply attempts to trample their way through whoever they’re attacking.

The biggest piece that would need work is sieges. Sieges should take place primarily at an abstraction level that allows them to play out over in-game days, weeks, months or even years - but then when the action ramps up you can switch to the normal battle scale to cover moments of interest. Both players should be constantly engaging in building and tearing down fortifications - Alexander’s causeway to Tyre literally caused that city to stop being on an island, and you the player should be able to build similar earthworks. Huge ramps up to the walls, a second set of walls around your own troops ala Alesia, capturing water sources, digging tunnels, dropping hungry bears in the tunnels, etc.

Every time your army is on the march it’s should be like playing Oregon trail, where your main goal is preventing as many of your troops from dying of disease before the battle as possible. Scouts give you conflicting information about the enemy’s size and location and you have to sort it all out, river crossings are an ordeal forcing you to build rafts or a bridge or just risk wading through, food relies on supply trains to the mother country and a lot of foraging (ie stealing from local farmers), non-allied cities that you come across will preemptively surrender if your force is large enough and send you aid, and so on.

I’m not sure if you can do a “grand campaign” with all of this detail, so I would start with just a few specific ones, Hannibal in Italy, Caesar in Gaul, etc. Each one only has a few battles and a lot of events between them, with alt-history that can occur based on your choices and how well you play.

Swift currently holds ownership of two Dassault jets

What the fuckkkkkk whyyyyyyyy

Talk of advertisements in the Windows app menu was the last straw for me. I don’t use any programs that require Windows so I don’t have dual boot or anything - although I do have a KDE theme that mimics Windows 95/8 because that was what I grew up with and I’m super nostalgic for it.

That said, I’ve always been attracted to “third options”. My favorite phone was a Windows Phone, my motorcycle is from a small manufacturer, etc.

I think it’s just regular Operant Conditioning, but the reward of finding half a pie was so strong that the association will stick to this bush for a lot longer than if it was a smaller one.

This is doubly true for ignoring noises/feelings on your motorcycle.

I haven’t used many, but after fucking with Ubuntu, Pop OS and Mint I switched to base Debian 12 and it’s the cleanest my desktop PC experience has ever been. My computer doesn’t do anything I’m not expecting it to, it doesn’t have any bloatware, every program I’ve installed has worked clean out of the box exactly as advertised (except for the occasional Proton/Wine wrangling which is universal).

lmao.jpg

Anyway I think he’s pretty good. He’s been making content since before he was a socialist, and even then he was making content for a while before he started really identifying as a Marxist-Leninist, so there’s no shortage of bad takes in his archive - but as he comes off now in his podcast he’s pretty radical and well-informed. The most recent objection I’ve seen to him is disagreement with his belief in MMT, a topic which I don’t know enough about to meaningfully comment on.