Little things that annoy the hell out of you

[Mischief Maker]

I got a letter today from a shit job I haven't worked at in over a decade. Silly me, I thought maybe there was a class-action lawsuit and I was getting a check or something. Nope!

"Oopsy-whoopsie! We got hacked. Now whoeverthefuck has your social security number and all your other sensitive info. But don't worry, we got you 12 free months of some bullshit Equifax service!"

Looks like it's time to do a credit freeze through no fault of my own!

[Steamflogger Boss]

Plumbing. Fuck it tbh.

[orange808]

When artists make a carbon copy cover of a song, bring nothing original or worthwhile to the piece, and drop it as a single. Lazy.

[vol.2]

yeah that's awful. it can be cool only in a live context where a band plays a cover song just as a lark, especially in an encore.

[null1024]

So, apparently my fucking Xbox controller has been screwing things up in a way that looked like GPU driver problems on my new PC.

It turns out that if you have a Series S/X controller, and your screen is randomly turning black before coming back, and games subsequently have their performance murdered until you reboot, go update the firmware of the controller with the Xbox Accessories app in the MS Store.
It's causing a DirectX error, which causes DWM to restart, which apparently reinitializes the GPU and ruins everything.

I'd previously just thought it was DuckStation screwing up somehow and crashing the GPU driver, since that was the only other time it happened until I started playing Strive for hours on end.
Seeing it happen in other programs had me deeply worried, and a lot of searching the symptoms had pointed to an issue from three years ago where Nvidia drivers had an incompatibility with a Windows 10 update. However, that was apparently fixed years ago.

Only reason I found out is because apparently the DWM server crashing was the only thing wrong that showed up in the system event log, nothing related to the display driver crashing or anything, and googling that particular event log item gave me the fix.
Looking up the log dates, every failure is from after I got the new controller too.

[Udderdude]

Note to self: Don't buy newfangled Series S/X controllers.

[orange808]

This one is obvious, but still: I hate it when former millionaires start a GoFundMe. If I had made millions, I'd be all set for life. "Give me money, because I'm a dumbshit." No. No, I won't give you shit.

I support universal health care, free education, and a social safety net. I don't support giving you money because people know your name.

Please send me money, though. I can invest it and live a good life. If everyone pools their resources, I can be very well off. Whatcha think?

[Steamflogger Boss]

What wanker is doing this? Lol

[orange808]

What wanker is doing this? Lol

This one:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/please-help- ... ett-butler

Don't contribute to this. She can cut costs and she can get a job-bee-job. Would have been very easy to make a financial plan to shield most of her wealth. She was a millionaire.

Please help your own friend. Let your friend sleep on your couch. Do an intervention on your friend.

***Also, please send me $20,000. My dad was murdered in a hit and run (true story). Seriously, that is true. So, I'm a victim. It is true. Please help heal my scars with sweet greenbacks.

[null1024]

Note to self: Don't buy newfangled Series S/X controllers.

hah
The most annoying thing is that they're basically the best controllers I've used in years -- the d-pad is really nice [if absurdly loud and clicky; everything about the controller is loud] and the unit is fairly comfortable in the hand.

But yeah, everything needing firmware updates is miserable. On one hand, it lets problems be fixed in the field; on the other hand, it encourages problems to crop up during development because anything wrong can just be fixed later, so it's no problem if something slips through. Blech.

[Udderdude]

I'm just waiting for controller DLC to become a thing. You know it's going to happen at this rate.

[orange808]

I'm just waiting for controller DLC to become a thing. You know it's going to happen at this rate.

Love this. Funniest thing I've read in a while. I can see it, now.

The UPlay Store pops up with a message: "Unlock left directional movement" for easier maneuverability in "Assassin's Creed Neutral: Doing Nothing In Switzerland" or buy the Essential Left Turn Pack to move left in all UbiSoft games for 25% off!

[BulletMagnet]

"Unlock left directional movement" for easier maneuverability in "Assassin's Creed Neutral: Doing Nothing In Switzerland"

But if the game is about doing nothing then you should be paying to have various controller functions locked so you could do nothing more efficiently and skip the grind!

[orange808]

"Unlock left directional movement" for easier maneuverability in "Assassin's Creed Neutral: Doing Nothing In Switzerland"

But if the game is about doing nothing then you should be paying to have various controller functions locked so you could do nothing more efficiently and skip the grind!

Nope. This one is ALL races across the rooftops! Nothing better than Assassin's Creed races!

Thrill to the excitement of wondering what parkour move your character will do. Hold the parkour button and pray for the best! Now, that's fun!

[Blinge]

It actually was and still is fun in Arse Creed 2 and Brotherhood tho

dunno how they managed to fuck it up afterwards

[orange808]

Saw the Metroid Dread trailer today. MercurySteam seems to be gritting their teeth and grunting again. We know what that means! Time to squeeze out another shitty, sterile, and lifeless "paint by numbers" insult to a beloved franchise! I guess Ninty can serve the fan-made game crowd best by serving up games that feel like fan-made indie games. Yuk.

[vol.2]

I was fully expecting M.D. to be a crap sandwich. Thing that really gets me is that they want to charge full AAA prices for a farmed-out third party game like that.

[orange808]

Tech sites that simply.copy/paste press releases as "stories" and the media platforms that serve them to me as suggestions.

For instance, I was attacked by a canned headline (and a blurb of their press release) about how Intel is about to revolutionise gaming. (lmao Okay, buddy. If you say so.) Intel hasn't ever done a damn thing in the GPU space and there are zero benchmarks. What's their plan? Rename everything? Maybe they could rename 30 frames per second with their own custom acronym "60 FPSf" using a special nonsensical measurement unit that makes no sense (to hide their lack of innovation). Who would do that kind of thing? Oh wait! I know: Intel!

[emphatic]

That "Premiere" thing YouTube has (I hope this is what it's called in English). When I browse my subscriptions to add stuff to Watch Later, videos that hasn't premiered yet show up, and when you watch your Watch Later playlist, you are stuck with a preview and have to skip it. Why not just filter them out until they can be watched?

[ED-057]

Time to revisit this little facet of our decadent world...

Trying to pay for some junk on ebay and suddenly got assaulted by the most detestable thing on the internets: scroogle reCraptcha. I don't know if this is ebay's fault or paypal's fault but when I find out who did it then it's boycott time. (╯°益°)╯彡┻━┻

It was paypal that was doing it before. I saw the same thing on other sites. But I found that when the paypal captcha came up I could simply close the window and start over. It wouldn't appear the second time. This is good because trying to use my credit card instead of paypal now comes with its own form of harassment, the brilliant "hurrdurr let us text you a code" game. Sorry, I don't feel like getting up to dick around with a phone when I already have a far superior wonder of technology right in front of me. It's called a "computer". How about that, eh? I guess you didn't really want that payment processing fee.

But now ebay is barfing up captchas themselves. I was going to buy something but gave up. I told them they'd better clean up their act, or else.

On the one hand, some people complained enough about how an app was going to ban porn that the decision was "suspended." But on the other hand, Apple says they're going to install (more) thought-police-ware on their phones and they don't care what you think. So I'm not sure if we'll ever get a campaign against being conscripted into unpaid labor for big tech.

[orange808]

I hate the way Google pops up a bullshit captcha and dumb warning about "suspicious" behavior from my browser when I block them from tracking me. Not being able to further monitize my search (beyond the reasonable ability to show ads based on my search) and build a profile on me isn't "suspicious". That's bullshit.

Of course, you literally (almost) need a CS degree to properly understand and counter all the ways they do track you.

[null1024]

Games that support resolution changes that don't let you pick whatever window size you want when run in windowed mode.
It's especially bad when the game only offers the list of video card resolutions, and even more dumb when your card supports some entirely odd resolution that shows up in the list and works fine with the game, so it's not even like the game can't scale to run at any arbitrary one.

The actual worst thing I've seen is a game that doesn't change the resolution in fullscreen mode, but still insists on only offering the specific ones the video card can change to anyway. It's really, really, really stupid.

[Sumez]

Huhhh, eBay has been using captchas for like 10 years at least.

[null1024]

God damn it, I think the PSU in my machine just died. Right outta nowhere too -- was playing Guilty Gear and then click, pshow, off.

I could replace it myself, but the machine is under warranty, and one of the provisions is that using a different PSU other than what they sent voids the warranty.
It fails the paperclip test [which the manufacturer's site tells you to do when the machine isn't whirring to life], where you short the power-on pin to ground and then turn the PSU on to see if it spins up.
I get power on any connected USB devices, but that's it, I don't think the PSU is kicking itself out of standby.

[BulletMagnet]

When my computer tells me all the driver updates I just spent downloading and installing have, in fact, been downloaded and installed...buuuuut they somehow aren't and I have no idea why.

[vol.2]

that sounds like a mac thing

[BulletMagnet]

Nope, a plain ol' Windows laptop...seems I've got some Googling ahead of me, bleh.

[Mischief Maker]

Ain't it wonderful how Microsoft shitcanned its QA department and now uses their customer base as unpaid QA?

Though I guess once the powers that be saw we were willing to do the work of a grocery clerk for free with those self-checkout scanners, it was only a matter of time.

[mamboFoxtrot]

lol yeah whenever I have a Windows problem and Google it, there will be a bunch of Microsoft Support Threads where the Official Response is useless (the usual "update your drivers / do a factory reset" stuff) and its up to all the other people in the responses to try and actually help this guy
(when, of course, its not just a totally unanswered help ticket)

my favorite Useless Official Response so far is when a guy was complaining about... well, I can't remember exactly, but Windows Media Player was insisting on doing something with one or more of his extra hard drives he installed. He was asking how to get WMP to back the hell off, but the MS response was a short guide on how to completely disable his extra hard drives LMFAO

[Udderdude]

I don't think I've even had WMP enabled on my PCs or laptops for half a decade ..