I’m glad you mentioned the bugs. I was slowly leaning towards it but I’ve done my fair bit of… “unpaid beta testing” for one lifetime.
I miss my BlackBerry phones. The Titan range was cool but buggy as well. If they could just do a Nothing phone with a QWERTY keyboard, I would literally buy one overnight.
you can’t park there, mate
Also, cool as fuck. Nice job!
Get on. Love it. I’m pretty sure the quality and efficacy of cracks and warez were directly proportional to how hard the mad chiptunez hit.
It wasn’t a real crack unless your eardrums had been blown out by an impromptu 16-bit EDM sesh.
I’ve been out of the loop for a long long time, but are they still absolute bangers of MIDI tracks?
Chatting to a friend or a group is nice, but sitting alone is amazing.
On my days off I quite enjoy going into town and getting a corner table; either reading; studying; catching up on text messages or group chats; or generally just staring out the window thinking about sweet fuck all.
My other half thinks it’s a waste of money - and whereas it’s true that coffee at a retailer is ludicrously expensive for what it is; I’m paying for the chance to sit somewhere else and just do my own thing. The caffeine juice is just a nice bonus.
One of my guilty pleasures is going into the local city centre in the week running up to Christmas; sitting in a coffee shop in a shopping centre atrium or near a window overlooking a concourse or walkway; and just peoplewatch. It’s interesting to watch someone walk for thirty or forty seconds and try to figure out their life story leading up to that moment.
I suppose in that moment, I’m not alone at all, I’m in company with everyone.
I can’t say there’s anything that really jumps out at me aside from maybe the presumably mirrored Super Mario World…
…but Argick running a non-Sonic game? Sure I’m up for that!
I had to chuckle in an exasperated way when I opened the Xbox app on my phone… and there’s a fucking Copilot tab in there as well.
I understand the use cases for AI, but Microsoft seems to be throwing the whole lot at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Really?
My seed ratio is going to be OVER 9000!!!11
Sorry friend.
If your data was occupationally-sensitive or renders you vulnerable to financial ruination, it’s time to move to a recovery phase and see if modern data recovery specialists can work their voodoo.
Remember: never run experimental commands (you or a GenAI) in a live environment. See how it breaks things in a test environment first - if it shits itself, you may even get to learn how to fix it before running the instruction on live data.
Anecdote time! A good friend of mine drove his car to a mutual colleague’s place once because the wipers were about as much use as two chicken breasts on metal poles. He says to our colleague “Hey Foxy, I hear you’re good with cars, can you fix these wipers for me? The rubber seems to be in good nick but it’s not clearing anything”.
“Sure thing,” Foxy proudly announces, “I’ll get to work”.
Foxy strips the wipers down, one component at a time, before dusting his hands off and walking away.
“What’s going on, Foxy? The thing’s still in bits!” my pal says.
“No idea,” says Foxy, “not a fucking Scooby mate” and goes back inside, leaving his wipers and actuating motor in about fourteen pieces on the roadside.
So much for being good with cars.
That and Mallory Towers were staples in UK schools.
Most of the fun was telling the Raven to fuck off.
Oh my word, that was a beautiful but incredibly tough read.
edit: sharing my experience below, the length got a bit out of hand!
I live about four or five hundred miles from where I grew up with family, and I got wind of my dad being in hospital. I gave him a call like I did every short while, and the opening lines were a bit of a comedy:
“Hi dad, how are you?”
“Aye I’m alright thanks”
“Anything exciting happening? Any news with you?”
“no not really”
“… you’re in the hospital, aren’t you dad?”
“…yeah” 😂
We had a good chat - I offered to fly down and see him but it all seemed very positive and I’d already had plans to pop down the following month.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance - a couple of weeks later I got the dreaded phone call that he’d died as a complication of his illness. I was obviously gutted, but I consider myself very very very fortunate that in that phonecall, I had the opportunity to have a good chat with him and was able to tell him everything I wanted to, there was nothing left unsaid.
Anyway…
The part of our brain that does evaluation, desire, and choice has been completely overrun; when someone asks “I’m gonna grab sushi, do you want any” we stare at them in confusion.
Absolutely. The day after my old man died, I was due to cover a night duty at my old workplace. It’s a straightforward role to deal with stuff that comes up, most of which is safety-critical in the industry so drinks, drugs, poor behaviour or low mental health are things to declare beforehand so you don’t put yourself or colleagues at risk of clouded decision making.
My other half was away on a family visit, so a dear friend of mine invited me round for a few days to avoid the workplace - I politely declined thinking I was gutted but otherwise okay. I relented on going out to the local town for the afternoon - the Coca Cola truck was doing a promo thing so it would have been a good laugh before work.
And it was - I had a good half hour. He invited me round to his place for a quick BBQ before work, and it sounded like a good idea. Went to Tesco, and we were stood in the meats aisle. He asked me:
“Do you fancy burgers or hotdogs?”
I wasn’t arsed either way. I just said “I’m not bothered mate, whatever you fancy”. He wasn’t having it.
“Do you want the burgers, or a hotdog?”
I wasn’t moved one way or another, I’m usually happy enough to eat most things so I just said “i don’t mind mate, you choose”. Nope. Wasn’t having it.
“No fella, I’m asking you. Do you want burgers, or a hotdog?”
I was getting a bit miffed at him asking me the same shit over and over but I just ran with it, and looked at both things he had in each hand. I could see the prepacked meat in each hand, but I couldn’t choose. I knew I could just almost flip a coin in my head and pick left or right, but I couldn’t critically evaluate what I wanted in such a basic decision. My mind felt like it was full of treacle, able to look and think and feel, but unable to move itself in a particular direction.
I understood what he was doing. “I’m sorry bruv,” I said, “I can’t choose”. I phoned up and booked my three remaining shifts off.
It was the strangest feeling being unable to make that decision. It wasn’t a hard call, just the mind was under so much stress I wasn’t aware of that I couldn’t just step forward.
As it happens I went home, had a good cry, got changed, and went back to his place for the evening and got hammered with him - lots of beer, Die Hard and Predator, and cracking tunes through to about 6am.
Not necessarily a shooter, but Out of Sight was a cool take on the Second Person genre, and unusually eerie because of that very mechanic.
Fourth for Summit.
Say what you like, Summit Squad are nothing if not dedicated.
It’s a bit of a wank article to be honest - it doesn’t even go on to say if the SIM was delivered. Why not wait the extra day and publish the article after it was due to be delivered?
If it didn’t get delivered then it’s easy meat for Trump-kicking, and if it did get delivered then you’d get some sort of review from some other poor fucker daft enough to sign up to it.
Bit of a waste of time really.
In fairness, nobody specifically told me not to kill other folk or set people’s houses on fire or sexually harass folk. What I did have drilled in to me was an idea of mutual respect; personal boundaries; how not to be a complete dickhead (some may say I’ve not learned much at all about that bit); and how to coexist with others to make everyone’s day that little bit easier, regardless of their gender identity.
I can only assume those basic life lessons are either not being driven home as strongly as they should be in modern life; or there’s outside influences drowning out those voices.
I’m sorry to hear that you had some arsehole giving you such poor life “advice” though. I hope it hasn’t defined or shaped your values of intimacy. It’s yet another erosion of (what I’m assuming) are women’s rights from an early age, and it’s bang out of order.
That’s very kind of you, thank you for the crash course - some great pointers!
What a shame.
Their work on the Doom port to 3DO was an absolutely olympic task. It was a shame following the rapid downward spiral of their health on Bluesky.
Her last post on her crowdfunder was a kick right in the feels too:
“…So I can make a worthy entrance for reuniting with my one true love, Jennell Jaquays.”
Rest well.
Honestly I never opened it. I have a Master System II and in fairness, the difference in game ports are negligible for the most part, so I never really looked at repairing it.
Speaking more broadly, I wouldn’t mind learning how to solder - my skills have mostly been in software rather than hardware. Things like fucking about with a Raspberry Pi and their expansion boards sounds like a right laugh.
The Passport was actually a really decent phone but the jokes did get old.
“When are you going to wall-mount your phone?”
“fucking hell that will kill someone if you drop it”
“you don’t need to send that text, that person can fucking read it from here!”
etc etc etc