The Evil Farming Game

I"m gonna get the details really vague, Whang actually took notes, go watch his videos on the subject. The story goes something like this:

Someone turned up to r/lostmedia or something asking about this video game they sweared they played. It was a farming game like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley, but the player character murdered his wife, and in addition to tending the crops, you have to move the corpse around to hide it from the cops, and also there was a fishing minigame.

Cue a couple of "I think I have it on an old hard drive"s later, and it turns out that it didn’t exist as a game. Some game streamer had kind of made it up as a stream of consciousness while playing some other game. “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a game where…”

Bloggo’s Pow

I learned this story from Ashens. Back in the day, a British anti-piracy group called FAST or the Federation Against Software Theft ran a campaign of comic stips with an anti software piracy theme. Imagine Don’t Copy That Floppy by way of Jack Chick. They apparently offered a bounty on anyone who was committing software piracy, so they published cartoons of kids turning in their math teacher because he copies video games, etc.

In one cartoon, they find a vendor at “the market” who is selling pirated games. One of our badly drawn heroes says “These games look pirated. And this one definitely is” and he holds up a box labeled “Bloggo’s Pow.” According to Ashens, pirated games were thenceforth known as “Bloggos”

According to Ashens, FAST was first of all incorrect in the use of the word “theft” as at the time according to British law, copying a video game did not count as theft, because you didn’t deprive anyone of their property. Software piracy was a crime, but that crime wasn’t theft. He also made the point that the FAST tracts tended to either offer threats of punishment, or appeals to greed with the bounty they offered (which there’s no evidence was actually claimed). I mentioned Don’t Copy That Floppy, which features a famously cheesy rap dance component but it then settles down and goes for an empathy-based approach, they interview game programmers who say if everyone stole games, they’d have no income, which means they couldn’t afford to make games, they’d have to go find other work. And that worked a lot better.

The Game They Made Up In Playing Dangerous 2

Playing Dangerous is a movie probably best known today for being featured on RedLetterMedia’s Best of the Worst. It can be best summed up as “Die Hard, but the protagonist is a 10 year old boy.” It seems it was written and filmed as an R-rated movie, then edited to make it PG-13 (a man gets shot in the face in the first ten seconds of the film) and then marketed as if it’s a Home Alone ripoff. The kid is some intelligent beyond his years computer whiz named Stewart, which forms the basis of the sequel.

Playing Dangerous 2 slops back and forth between “Supergenius kid has an internship at a computer research company” and “10 year old honors student attends computer camp for 10 year old honors students.”

At one point, Stewart is hanging around the “lab” with his mentor character, Guy Who Works There, and they’re playing this video game that I guess they made. When you see the screen, the background looks like a 90’s arcade side scrolling beat-em-up, there’s a Score counter and an Energy meter in the upper corners, and Stewart is green screened in very prominently in the foreground shooting at the camera with a Nerf gun.

It does, and yet doesn’t, look like a video game. There doesn’t seem to be any gameplay, you can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a first-person shooter and Stewart is an enemy, or if Stewart is the player character and they made the weird choice to have him face the player. But, it does work as a thing a middle aged dude would come up with to occupy the attention of a kid he’s supposed to be teaching computers to, and it also works as what a mediocre film director thinks a computer game looks like. Obviously a film director would choose to have his star face the camera, he’s performing.

Ahoy’s video about Polybius is very excellent.

I have a cat. Toilet lid is shut unless actively in use otherwise there will be the worst kind of wet cat loose in the house because she’s dumb and clumsy.

Anything found on aliexpress, temu or wish. Manufactured trash/industrial runoff that’s likely dangerous to breathe near.

Television news. In fact, most of the shit on television these days.

The idea cancer for toddlers section of youtube, which I think they have since cleaned up. The “finger family pregnant elsa kills hitler spiderman” era. Which was kind of fascinating to study, because no one was in charge. iPad children weren’t making decisions, they were just letting the colors and sounds happen, and actual people deciding to make the content, sometimes to the point of wearing costumes and shooting live video, were making what the algorithm deemed popular. At least one woman pulled a bright blue dress over a fake baby belly while her husband scribbled a toothbrush mustache on a Spiderman mask and didn’t think “What the hell are we even doing right now?”

Reaction videos can be done right. There’s a vocal coach on Youtube who listens to and comments on the vocal techniques in use in famous songs, the most fun ones are the ones she’s never heard before. It’s also really easy to do this kind of content lazily, play someone else’s video and remember to say “oh shit” occasionally.

The experience of managing a consumer-grade LAN appliance:

Open web browser

Start typing 192.168.0.1

It auto-inserts 192.168.0.12 because that’s the IP address of your NAS, and you’ve logged into it to adjust something at some point in the last six months. You register it has done this as you’re releasing the Enter key.

click Back.

Type the IP address again, this time carefully deleting the 2 it oh so helpfully inserted.

Wait 3 to 5 business weeks while the 16-bit ARM microcontroller they put in these things serves a web page like old people fuck. It loads to a completely useless stats page that has no information that anyone has ever needed to know.

Click LAN Setup.

Wait 3 to 5 business weeks while the 16-bit ARM microcontroller they put in these things serves a web page like old people fuck.

Parse the wall of acronyms before you, click the link that says DHCP.

Wait 3 to 5 business weeks while the 16-bit ARM microcontroller they put in these things serves a web page like old people fuck.

It continues in that fashion until you get what you need done or your network stops working and you have to get a pen and press the Reset button on the back of the device.

You know that fat British guy that someone is posting shorts of on Youtube/Tiktok? “I was working for a company and their main product wasn’t selling. They asked me if they should lower the price, I told them ‘no, make your entry level product more shit.’ So they took their entry level product and added roofing nails to the seat cushions. Overnight, sales of their main product skyrocketed because no one was buying their entry level anymore.” That guy? He said he likes Samsung’s folding phone because “I’m old and my vision is failing, so I like the larger screen of the Fold. But you can’t sell that, because it’s not cool to sell products for the old and infirm.”

I think you’ll find that community is exactly that. I forget which it is, I’ve long since blocked it.

They’re imagining the community (the subreddit) as a space one enters by navigating to the community’s main page, and “leaving” it is going to do other things.

A major difference I noticed with Lemmy from my time on Reddit is communities aren’t quite as rabid about strict adherence to their topic or gimmick. r/whatisthisthing banned me for seven days once for elaborating what an E6B flight computer is for. Because “This community is for IDENTIFYING the thing, not DISCUSSING the thing!” Not…so much of that around here.

I suspect getting pissed off is the point.

One of the rules of that community is “post before you leave.” People put “rule” in the post to indicate they’re complying with that rule.

My cat walking back and forth across my pillow wanting food, the selfish little quadruped.

I somehow doubt that.

My last desktop PC has been retasked as an HTPC. The CPU in it requires a graphics card for the system to POST, it’s currently mounted in a SFF case with barely room for two 2.5" drives, so it would either make for a shitty, difficult to service, bulky for what it does, power inefficient NAS, or I’d have to buy a new case and CPU.

My current machine is in an mATX mini-tower, there’s room for hard disks and the 7700X has integrated graphics so I could haul the GPU out, but it’s still kind of bulky for what you’d get.

So I’m gonna keep my Synology in service for a little while longer, then build a NAS from scratch selecting components that would be good for that purpose.

Do NOT mention Nicole.

It is my understanding that this is a byproduct of Google’s company culture. Google hires software engineers, they’re incentivized to invent something of their own. They do so. They get promoted. There isn’t room in their company structure for anything to be maintained, maintaining someone else’s project isn’t a path to promotion. So Play Wallet is now Android Pay is now Google Pay is being sunset.

Oh, and Google is an American corporation, so anything that doesn’t promise infinite exponential growth in revenue or unprecedented opportunities for cruelty is shot in the head as worthless.

Those are where the money comes from, re adsense. Remember, Google is a B2B company, they sell public attention to advertisers.

I was promoted from the rank of Commander Aggravated.

The avatar is an AI creation.

Carbon-Zinc batteries are basically impossible to find, yes. They were pretty much entirely superseded by Zinc Chloride batteries, which are fairly easy to find. They’re often marketed with the phrase “heavy duty” though they’re lower in capacity to alkalines.

People who hurt cats. If you hurt a cat, may you be paralyzed but awake and not numb for the entire duration of an open heart surgery.