shmups.system11.org

Holy Diver is like Dracula with all Medusa Heads replaced by the much rarer and deadlier homing Ghosts and Ravens. Still need to acquire that brilliant game...

Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, president of Brazil from 1956 to 1961, was the only gipsy who ever became president of a country.

The new mascot for Fukushima Industries (yes THAT Fukushima) is named... are you ready for this?!

FUKUPPY!

no shit.. I wish I was joking.



More here.

Wow. Intentional or not, that's Verhoeven-tier.

Took me a bit to get it. I had to try real hard to pronounce that word as anything close to fuck-up instead of "foo-koo-pee".

The character is ridiculous, though.

Disney's The Little Mermaid was the movie that spent the longest time in development hell: work began shortly after the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1937, but it only came out in 1989.

The Japanese dropped bombs full of fleas infected with the bubonic plague during the Sino-Japanese war.

After producing Street Fighter, Takashi Nishiyama left Capcom for SNK. There he produced Fatal Fury according to his idea of what a sequel to Street Fighter should be.

Therefore, in a sense, Fatal Fury is Street Fighter II.

With the passing of Nelson Mandela, I must clarify a previous statement here. I said Graça Machel is the only person in the world to have been married to the presidents of two different nations -- Samora Machel of Mozambique, and Mandela of South Africa. However, as a vestige of a medieval arrangement, the president of France and the bishop of Urgell are the co-princes of Andorra. Thus, one may regard every French first lady as the first lady of Andorra at the same time.

1) I have an old Realmagic Hollywood MPEG2 decoder PCI card with Sigma Designs chipset. And when it comes to 4:3 interlaced source material, I prefer to watch it on a CRT TV connected to the card rather than on the PC using VLC or whatever. Problem: the player program included with the card enforces region coding. After all these years I found a solution (which does not involve burning a copy of the DVD just to change the region).

After ripping a DVD using smartripper, it is possible to open individual VOBs, but it didn't seem possible to play the whole disc in sequence. I saw that one can setup a playlist under the "options" menu, but the UI is moronic, and if you try to browse the harddisk it will start searching the entire drive and lead to a crash. To workaround this, I used the SUBST command to map the directory containing the ripped DVD to its own drive letter and attempted to build a playlist from that drive. However it acted like there were no files there. Finally, I discovered that renaming the VOBs to .MPG files causes them to appear, at which time they can be added to the playlist and I can sit back and watch my f*ing DVD.

2) In the interest of maintaining functionality using my preferred browser (Opera 9.25 on Windows 2000) I started looking into WTF is going on with Adobe Flash.

The stupid updater app that appears when booting up (much to my dismay, I still don't know how it does this or how to be rid of it) has apparently been broken since 2010 at the latest. For some years it was downloading and pretending to install the updates but not actually updating the NPSWF32.DLL file in the Opera 9.25 plugins directory so that was quite old. (And this behavior was not specific to Win2k, but also happening in XP and 7.) In 2013 the updater stopped pretending to work at all in Win2k (although it still pops up to ask anyway, naturally).

From searching the web it was not clear what the latest version of Flash was that would install on Win2k. Some said 10, others 11. I downloaded 10.3.xxx and tried to install. It claimed there was a newer version available and refused to install. So I manually deleted the existing Flash files, and the WINNT\SYSTEM32\MACROMED\FLASH directory. Rebooted, and attempted to install again. It ran. I made sure that the NPSWF32.DLL had made its way to the OPERA\PROGRAM\PLUGINS directory. Now some video sites are working again that had been non-working as of late.

3) I also played around with Qupzilla a bit. It is a recent browser that will install and run in Win2k. Youtube displays a message claiming that it will soon be dropping support for "Safari." The amusing part about this is that it doesn't bother to display any such warnings in various older browsers (eg. Opera 9.25). Of course, it is still not nearly as maddening as the fucking forum I visit which BLOCKED me when I attempted to read using Firefox 2 under WinNT3.51, and also BLOCKED fucking WGET, but worked fine in Opera 5/NT3.51 which is much older than Firefox 2.

I know this is hard to believe, but there was a time when the "M" in "MTV" stood for "Music", not "Many trashy reality shows for entitled teenage girls with an IQ below two digits", as it is now.

Kiss originally had their stage wardrobe custom-made from a gay S&M store.

www.metalsludge.tv/?p=38947

Glass is not a solid, but a highly viscous liquid.

Ghana is the closest country to the centre of the Earth.

I believed this for a long time; turns out it's not true.

http://io9.com/the-glass-is-a-liquid-my ... -496190894

just one of the links that comes up googling "glass liquid."

Dang. That was a pretty cool false fact, though.

Another common misunderstanding is that a "sleeping" arm or leg is from the blockage of blood flow. It's actually from pressure on nerves.

My mind has just been blown

I can believe that, but is it from both? When I wake up after falling asleep on my arm overnight, I can really hear the blood bore as it courses back into my arm. At that point, I have some semblance of control and feeling again.

The recent article on slate.com states that issues like this concerning blood circulation are rare.

SW Utah? I always hear it as "Hurr-kin" But either way it's pretty annoying.

The number of males raped by females is roughly the same as the other way around.

Globally? Or males raped by males?

When a man says he was raped by a woman, everybody laughs it off. Serious shit other way around. The double standards dont help anybody.

Two American First Ladies, Edith Wilson and Nancy Reagan, are descendants of Pocahontas.

Pearls are composed of calcium carbonate in a crystalline formation, and can thus be dissolved in vinegar.

Eyelash extensions were invented in 1916 for D.W. Griffith's film Intolerance.

Wait a minute, what? Males raping males or females raping males?

It's happened to me before, but I wasn't very bothered by it. I broke contact with her for a few years to teach her a lesson & waited for a heartfelt apology. She eventually did apologize & confessed how bad it made her feel & I'm still friends with her to this day. People aren't perfect, especially when they are young, upset, or intoxicated. Self control takes time to develop for some people.

I'm more pissed about the murder attempt made by a different girl, who would have rather seen me dead than deal with the guilt of having been unfaithful - and that's why I'm celibate, safe, & on my damn own these days.

Useless fact: Mississippi has one of the highest STD rates in the United States. It's mostly herpes.

Every reliable statistic says otherwise, so Stormwatch has either uncovered a massive secret international all-female rape gang, or is ignoring the word "Facts" in the thread title.