Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.
Especially because certain aspects of the storyline are random on each playthrough. Who is and isn’t a replicant is not always the same, nor is how certain characters will react to the same dialog questions on subsequent runs. Depending on how the cards fall, this arguably also includes you.
Yes, I still have this on all four original CD’s.
I had this as a kid. From a shareware compilation CD.
For the Gen-Z kids in the audience, that’s like a little snapshot of the internet that you bought at a computer show or flea market for $2, and was worse than the internet because it didn’t have any boobies on it, except it was better than the internet because your parents wouldn’t gripe at you constantly for always tying up the house’s telephone line and you barely had to wait to play anything on it.
Where was I again?
Oh yeah. I got my ass kicked by that game. It was also cool that you could set any Windows .ico file as your player character, though. You could run around as Captain Notepad or Sir Calculator the Algebraic if you wanted to.
Commander Keen
Only if you never watch CV-11.
Given that I’ve consistently pirated Windows since I was tall enough to reach the keyboard, I am positive have never been in compliance with the Microsoft ToS. Somehow, I’m not too worried about it.
Sure, but it’s up from just a couple of years ago when Linux was sub 2%, and was hovering around only 1.5% in, say, 2020.
Y’all need to point me towards one of those tiny Linux systems. I have an old no-longer-bricked Toshiba Satellite that somebody gave me and I got it to boot again, so I slapped Mint on it to see how I liked it since I’ve never messed with that distro before. The only problem is this sucker is a dog, it’s only got 2 gigs of RAM and a pokey 5400 RPM platter drive in it. The thing sits there and thrashes swap constantly even when it’s doing nothing, and when Mint is creating one of its automated system image rollback things it’s completely unusable. I’m surprised the laptop platters don’t escape their casing and bore into the Earth like a drill bit.
I found that it will… eventually… load and run the latest FreeCAD build and once it’s going it’s actually not bad (awful screen resolution and single touch only trackpad notwithstanding). But getting there when taken altogether takes about 20 minutes…
doesn’t have Microsoft store
That is not a drawback.
I once heard it also involves a miserable little pile of secrets.
…And emissions valves, vacuum hoses, evap canisters, fuel cap/seals, possibly a valve cover gasket, serpentine belt, tensioner, and idlers, fuel filter, possibly the fuel pump. 500,000 kilometers is 310,685 miles for all the Yanks and Brits in the audience, and if you manage to drive a combustion car that far without needing all of those things, let alone any selection of them, I will eat my distributor cap.
If your site did not call visitors a flak monkey at least once I will be sorely disappointed.
If the case were that it weren’t, Path of Exile just to throw one example out there would have been piledrivered into dust by Blizzard for wholesale copying the UI layout for Diablo 2. Or better, Binding of Isaac for making an incredibly superficially Zelda-looking screen layout and despite being hugely popular, conspicuously not drawing the ire of the single most litigious batch of motherfuckers in the entire video game industry.
So, no, I’m pretty sure nobody can sue you for making a UI that looks similar to another UI.
Or a very badly made wall…
Tofu dreg construction, perhaps.
One can surmise it’s actually a life-sized model kit tank made out of cheap plastic, akin to how it works in Ground Defense Force! Mao-Chan.
The general consensus of the internet seems to be no, although this surely varies to some degree based on the laws in whichever country you’re in.
Before anyone tries the other avenue of attack, titles to things generally cannot be copyrighted, either. Content of a work can be, but the name of it cannot.
Pachinko in Japan is basically what slot machines are here, and they are arranged in a similar manner with similar degrees of design audacity. Most of them also have a slot machine built into them, which spins its reels (digitally, they’re all screens now) whenever you land a ball in a pocket or whatever. You get a fixed payout for landing a ball in a pocket, but you can also theoretically win a jackpot by winning at the slot machine aspect. So think of it like a slot machine that has a luck check before you can even pull the lever, and then another luck check to see if you actually win. Gamblers are already famously bad at understanding statistics, but I guarantee you practically nobody can accurately assess the risk vs. reward of that. It’s diabolical, but apparently also very effective.
For what it’s worth, I have an “old” Metal Army pachinko machine from circa 1998 and even mine has a color LCD screen slot machine reel in the middle of the playfield.
While we’re at it, even my dinky Metal Army machine is quite possibly the single loudest mechanical object ever manufactured in the history of mankind, and that’s when there’s only one of them. A ball bearing factory in full production during a tornado is probably quieter than a pachinko parlor at prime time.
Google Opinion Rewards app.
Unless Google Googles you. I used to use this, but I have apparently been permanently silently banned from it with no explanation and no recourse. I did nothing wrong or disingenuous as far as I can tell; It simply kept asking me – presumably based on my location – how my experience was with retailer X, Y, or Z was. Always stores which I had not visited but simply gone near, and I truthfully answered that I did not go to those places and it’d give me thirty cents or whatever, but then one day it just stopped offering me surveys at all, apparently forever.
So I guess this flags the magic Google algorithm that I am worthless as a consumer and the app no just longer does anything on any of my devices anymore. It loads, it displays, but it never presents me any surveys. It squatted there on my phone completely silent for six months, so I uninstalled it. What a crock.
Also, I’m sure they’re spying on you all the time through that app. Obviously it tracks your location, and Satan himself only knows what else it reports back to them. I think I’d give it a miss at this point. I’d rather pay $2 of real money for some app versus having Google snooping around behind me all the time just to get something for “free.”
But yeah, Torque Pro is worth it. I use it all the time. So is Alpine Quest. Those are the only two paid apps I ever use on my phone.
This is one of those things that sounds simple and intuitive on paper (“just” take all these communities of the same name from disparate instances, smash them together so they all display on the same page) but once you start thinking about the details it becomes clear that it’d be a logistical nightmare and a clusterfuck to actually implement.
For a start, moderation would become diabolically complex.
I think the only way this could possibly work at present is if were client-side, i.e. you can create your own supercommunity by merging content into a single page on your own device, but purely for display and in a read-only fashion. This would not provide the implicit benefit I think you’re angling for, though, which would be solving the Fediverse fragmentation problem.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, says the chump who has a series of precisely 103 formulaic knife reviews posted here.
Shallow Thought Of The Day: Any game mentioned in this thread twice is automatically someone who didn’t read all the comments before posting.