I wonder whether it digitised the video signal and sent digital RGB data over the connector, or whether there were analogue video channels provided for such a device.

Also, in any case, whether any hobbyist hackers have built adapters to use their Game Gear as a monitor for anything else through the same mechanism. (A HDMI in adapter would be cool, if slightly ridiculous.)

X11 was nifty, but limited by low ambitions. Its client/server model was simple: the application ran entirely on the UNIX host, and the terminal was just a dumb graphical display device: drawing commands went one way, and key/mouse events the other way. If only Sun had seen fit to open up NeWS, we could have ended up with apps’ UI layer running on the terminal, handling events and showing the interface, and the communication down the bottleneck between your terminal and the big UNIX machine running the business logic of the app being more structured (like, say, view-model objects and business-logic events). Of course, you’d have to write your UI code in PostScript, at least until someone invented Lua or something.

The problem is that GPS signals are weak, and generally need a line of sight to the sky. Phones don’t rely on GPS alone, but also get location data by triangulating base stations and/or querying databases of WiFi SSIDs over the internet. And AirTags don’t contain either a GPS receiver or an internet connection: they’re just simple, low-power Bluetooth beacons which send an encrypted ID to any nearby iPhones, which add their locations and forward it to Apple.

Basically, all the smarts are in Apple’s infrastructure (including the numerous privately-owned devices running Apple’s location services). Replicating this without a network of roving receivers is a nonstarter.

“takes a massive hit of ketamine and says”

Fuck Nintendo.

So, basically, Romantic Satanism, only for superhero comics?

Elton John, then still not fully out of the closet, made good use of that, writing a love song titled Nikita, though having the love interest in the video be a blonde woman in a fur hat (presumably to appease the record company).

“It was for our team-building circle jerk”

If she accessed Instagram from the same home network (and IP address) as her main phone, the zuckerbots inferred that the two users were probably in the same household and knew each other/had similar interests.

You can have those in the fediverse on Pixelfed and Mastodon. The problem is that then the people you can follow are only middle-aged Linux/Star Trek nerds and the occasional organic farmer.

Will it be American or Japanese? And how closely will it hew to the character’s official backstory (of being a girl (not a cat) named Kitty White born in mid-1970s London)?

Are those buildings meant to look burnt-out, like they’ve been hit by a bomb from a defendant?

Don’t they also have far-right leanings of some sort? If so, it’s not surprising.

Ms. Pac-Man. Those curves…

Masonry was the prototype for such movements. Historians have it emerging from stonemasons’ guilds accepting (and becoming fashionable to) aristocratic/bourgeois patrons in the 17th century, and then riding a number of historical waves (enlightenment-era coffee-house culture, the rise of nationalism in the romantic era in Europe, Napoleon, the British Empire, and so on). Others drew on it. The Bavarian Illuminati were probably the best known, but by no means only, esoteric secret society modelled on Masonry. In the other direction, Rotary was essentially Masonry without the woo. Various nationalist, royalist and sectarian secret societies (like the Carbonari in Italy and unionists in Northern Ireland) modelled themselves on Masonry, and Cuba is the only Communist country to not ban Freemasonry because a lot of the revolutionaries there were Masons. So yes, Freemasonry was more of a moment than a coherent thing.

Lon Milo Duquette the Thelemist occultist? I imagine he’d have incentives for taking maximalist interpretations, even if it involves taking leaps of faith. And doesn’t most of the “evidence” of the Illuminati existing beyond Weishaupt’s group come from hysterical anti-Masonic conspiracy theorists like Abbé Barruel (who blamed the horrors of the French Revolution on Masonry and Illuminism, which he conflated into a Satanic plot), and from other anti-Masonic conspiracy theorists who drew on his work?

Not that there weren’t groups claiming descent from the Illuminati, but along the same lines, for a long time you could join the Rosicrucians by sending a check to a PO box advertised in a magazine.

Their ranks for the 8 or so years they officially existed, or from claims that the Illuminati went underground and were involved in key moments in history? Are you conflating the Bavarian Illuminati with Freemasonry by any chance?

If it’s the actual Bavarian Illuminati, then they probably picked you as a credulous, deep-pocketed nobleman who can be pumped for membership dues in return for initiation to an endless ladder of degrees, each revealing profoundly esoteric secrets which don’t actually mean anything. If you’re one of a handful who show themselves to be sceptical and open-minded, perhaps Adam Weishaupt will take you aside and reveal that all that woo was just bullshit to part the rubes from their money, and the true mission of the Illuminati is to spread Enlightenment ideals, such as secularism and anti-monarchism, which the authorities take a very dim view of.

The alternative is having an exemption for religious texts. If the Bible was judged by the standards of secular literature, it would not be made available to children.

Also a number of very groovy lounge-jazz records composed in the 60s and 70s as advertising jingles and given away on promotional flexidiscs, in a way not really done anywhere except West Germany. A few decades ago, a Berlin label released a compilation of those titled Popshopping.