shmups.system11.org

I like how one of the answers is "windows doesn't let you change anything in the folder where the file is stored even as admin, so boot a Linux liveUSB and replace it that way".
Really goofy that in the year 1998+22, it's such a hassle.
There's no real technical restriction, just an unusually high artificial one.

I eventually disarmed the 1337 admin restrictions on the folder, but found only a bunch of exotically archived code. The solution I arrived at - open the archive with specialised viewer, find the file it's pointing at, replace it and repack the archive - seemed doable, but also liable to break something and cause far more problems than just dampening the fucker in volume mixer, so I left it. 2020.

I wouldn't even mind if it weren't such an obnoxiously peppy, go-get-'em ringtone. I use Skype mostly for work and checking up on elderly relatives, neither's typically a jovial occasion. What the fuck ever happened to beige? Totally underrated aesthetic, time and place for everything, etc etc.

I have to use Skype because of *ONE* single friend that somehow refuses to use Telegram or Discord. And it drives me insane how sometimes it will deliver a message with delays of up to 30 minutes, making it seem a greeting was never returned, or as if I had ignored one of the friends who later moved away from it. Or how about showing people as offline for hours despite them being logged on all that time? Sometimes a log out and restart fixes it, others it's necessary to shut it down and start it again for any "queued"/delayed messages to get through.

Just had to clean a disc I bought off eBay. Some stupid store had slapped their stupid sticker on it, and when I took it off, underneath there was a bunch of gunk that spelled out the word "VOID" left over on the disc. Took me half an hour with a bottle of isopropyl and some cotton balls to clean it off. Yuck. I can't believe there are still stores that do stupid crap like that. That's some 90's bullshit that I thought died out decades ago.

yuck.

bit of clean advise. try vegetable oil on anything non-porous like plastic (basically anything but paper).
most adhesives have a chemistry that is soluble in oils and they will just float away without much fuss. you can then bathe them in iso to remove the film. it's generally less aggressive than scouring with iso.

But how will I know whether to RENT or BUY??

Slow drivers.
I'm not talking a little slow either, I'm talking "less than 40 in a 65, in a leftward lane, flashers off, nothing in front of them for miles, and it's night".
Had to deal with that shit coming home tonight, and it's not like I could go around easily either. As I started to slow down, people started to overtake on both sides from behind, and I couldn't slow down as quickly as I'd like with another car behind me.

At least nothing happened. I slowed down without the guy behind me hitting me, waited for everything behind me to pass, and then made the pass around the slow moron in front. Still annoying.

I'm assuming you're in the US. This is a huge issue. Our roads basically don't work because people don't recognize or obey the rules consistently. This is because driver education in the US is a complete farce and they are more interested in getting people to buy cars and tires than they are in our safety.

I do not typically subscribe to "conspiracy theories," but I think it's the tire industry and the automotive industry. It's a huge conspiracy that goes back to when the highways were built and support for public transit was purposefully discouraged. All it takes is money to pay lobbyists and to line to pockets of dirty politicians and officials.

It's a very, very deep issue that has been going on since the 1800's:



If your interested, you can look into the American Streetcar Scandal. There is a movie about called Taken For A Ride. It goes over the Highway Lobby and the illegal things they did (some of which they were held accountable for). This is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. The coalition of automobile and tire manufacturers in the US is responsible for the laying of roads through neighborhoods and making huge parts of American cities unlivable and many other things.
You will find that many people are actively attempting to discredit the movie and make it look bad. The Highway lobby is alive and strong.

Meh und muh buddies had been enjoying Fall Guys until recently.

but now there's so many hackers that you get them in your game more often than not.
They float above the survival games so they don't get knocked off ever..
And race to the finish line in seconds.

There's no longer any point in playing.

What's interesting is when a mate of mine came 2nd to a guy fly-hacking. That means he's the defacto winner. In a real life event, obvious cheater gets disqualified, and 2nd becomes 1st in the eyes of anyone there.
However because the game doesn't explicitly say it, it still feels like my friend didn't win.

GOG has stopped making announcements for all its new games/expansions. Did you know Parkitect got a new DLC last week? You wouldn't if you were a GOG customer!

And it's not like their current site design isn't full of wasted space.

GOG? Aren't they losing money?

From what I understand, they've got a lot of business issues. I've read some pretty scathing accounts of toxicity in the workplace and poor management.
They once upon a time had a reasonable community, but their corporate culture (or whatever culture) seems to
have eroded everything.
They also have stopped releasing new older games for the most part. I still check their site pretty regularly and have a filter set to check every game pre-year-2000, and there have only been a handful of meaningful releases over the past few years.

I'm still hoping that they get their shit together, but maybe it's too much to ask.

GOG is directly connected to CD Projekt Red, and their Card Game-RPG hybrid Thronebreaker was a flop, so they ended up laying off several employees in early 2019. If Cyberpunk ends up a hit, GOG will stay afloat.

I stick with them because I'm a luddite who hates cloud computing and wants the ability to burn installers to disk. I have several old games from services that went tits-up that would have been lost to me forever if they weren't DRM-free and already burned to disk. I even bought a Blu-Ray XL drive that can burn 100 GB disks to keep up with modern game sizes.

As for old games, there aren't that many truly old classics left that GOG doesn't already have, and the ones it doesn't I think has more to do with the publishers than GOG itself.

Edit: fixed typo that made the situation seem way more dire than it actually appears to be.

I thought GOG was CD Projekt Red

damn man I had no idea.

Whoops! Typo. GOG laid people off in early 2019, not late.

And I can't find any news of them being in financial distress since then.

So to be clear, I don't think GOG is in danger of shutting down anytime soon, provided Cyberpunk doesn't bomb for some reason.

Right, and aren't they connected to the Witcher as well? The Netflix show must have been good for them.

Would be pretty sad if GOG shut down. They're the only mainstream online store offering DRM free everything, as far as I can tell anyway.

Think happy thoughts.

penny arcade is still a thing?

the art is so gross looking now jesus

It looks like they fed the character models into an AI and now a bot is just pumping them out.

It's unreal. Somehow western cartoon art becomes more hideous every year. Penny Arcade is an extreme example but it's happening everywhere.


Does CD Projekt even have the rights to that? I imagine it'd be going to the original author.

Seems we've stumbled upon a new thing that annoys the heck out of everyone!


I recall reading that the author originally didn't think the property would be very successful and sold the rights to CDPR for a one-time payment instead of royalties, but once it took off demanded they renegotiate; I believe they reached some sort of settlement, though how it breaks down I couldn't tell you.

It doesn't look that bad to me. Sorry to be "That guy".

That's what I heard too, but I assume it was only the rights to make games based on the books.

Some new PA panels look fairly "annoying", I can see what people are getting at. It's not bad art though.
Now old Penny Arcade, that was pretty bad art, and mostly just copy pasted assets. The artist guy has improved a lot over the years, and some of the stuff he makes actually looks pretty good, even if I'm not a big fan of the style either.

Honestly, the quality of the comic strips have improved over the years too. I'll admit I haven't read any over the past 2-3 years probably, but occasionally I'll see one that gets a good chuckle out of me. I'm sure there's a bunch of controversies surrounding them about various things, but fortunately I don't pay attention to that stuff.

Regardless of art quality I honestly kinda just don't get these kinds of comics that's just people standing around saying things the author wants to say and optionally providing some counter-point for the other to play off of. Should I think of them as the modern version of the ancient Greek Dialogues?

I've mentioned this in the past, but sometimes they make jokes/strips that require the reader to be familiar with a topic they've discussed in their forums. Usually, if you need to explain the joke, it's not funny.

It was funny to the people who didn't need it explained.