wizardbeard

Unfortunate to see that they haven't tested with xash3d or the like. I'd be especially interested in the ray tracing fork of xash being supported.

Improved lighting does wonders for old games, imo.

Not often enough. Been to two Protomen concerts and Weird Al's first "laid back/retirement" concert. Always buy at least one piece of merch.

So less than one a year. Was going to go to the Flaming Lip's Yoshimi anniversary concert, but life got in the way and I couldn't snag tickets.

It's something my wife and I talk a lot about, but life keeps getting in the way of us getting out to them.

We get out to local opera and classical music stuff a little more often, as my wife is somewhat involved in that scene, but I assume most people don'r think of recitals as concerts.

Then who was phone?

When the protests against scientology happened. Long before it was sold. Long before MAGA or the politics board were even a concept. It didn't die immediately from them, but it was the start of a measurable drop in discussion quality that never stopped.

The "protests" devolved into some of the cringiest irl meetups of online communities I have ever come across (yes, worse than dashcon), and it caused so much media attention that it accelerated the "eternal september" problem the site always had exponentially.

Motherfuckers forgot the golden rule about "hiding your power level", which at the time at least meant doing your best to appear relatively normal in public and went full "I'm a horribly socially maladjusted mess with bad hygiene who can only communicate via tired memes, look at me! Look at me! I know memes! Haha longcat is long am I right?".

A lot of people remember the cringe of reddit's "When does the narwhal bacon?" forced meme attempt at the world's most embarassing "secret pass phrase" bullshit. The scientology "protests" were significant orders of magnitude more cringe.

4chan was never a secret club, but the sheer agressiveness of non-tolerance towards obviously new posters helped to maintain a very low bar of "quality". I'd argue that's needed to maintain any semblance of a community on an entirely anonymous image board that has minimal moderation. Shitty threads would get saged relentlessly, eating up the maximum comments a thread could have and drowning out any discussion in the shitty thread, all without bumping it back up to the top. Hit the reply limit and the thread slides off the bottom, gone forever.

"Lurk moar, faggot" was the phrase of the time. Stop posting until you figure out how things work around here.

But as more and more people unfamiliar with what shitty community existed came in, there hit a point where they outnumbered the old guard, and the already low quality of discussion tanked.

/b/ used to have discussion threads about all sorts of shit. Actual thought provoking stuff now and then. Funny stories. Occasionally legitimately good OC. It was the breeding ground for most of the memes and meme formats that spread to the internet at large. Mudkipz, rickrolling, EFG (the progenitor of trollface and rage comics), lolcats, advice animals. All /b/.

Now it is almost entirely people sharing photos of women they know that they've downloaded off the ladies' social media accounts to jerk off to. Previously they would have been chased off to the dedicated porn (or softcore) boards using fire, pitchforks, and spam of the most digusting images the internet had until the posters got the message. Or at the very least they would have been bullied into a single thread at a time instead of taking over almost every thread on the board.

Instead it has all devolved to the absolute lowest common denominator.

/b/ (and by extension 4chan as a whole) has always been a cesspit. I'm not trying to deny that. There's screenshots out there of it back when the post count hadn't breached 1000 that show that it was shit even in the very very beginning. Back when it was almost exclusively m00t, W.T. Snacks, and their friends from Something Awful. That said, it used to be engaging to scroll through because you could stumble upon some legitimately good discussion. It hasn't been worth even trying to look for good discussion on /b/ for well over a decade.

The retro videogames board was a brief shining return to quality for a few years after it was created, even managed to find, back up, and translate some things that had been lost media. The DooM threads used to be the place to be for new DooM wads. Even that board's pretty shit now too.

I enjoy it, it's a decent twist on "nerd boy meets girl who brings him out of his shell" that mixes japanese occult with aliens, a small bit of high school slice of life, and shounen anime type battles where cleverness wins. Characters are written well, imo. Good humor.

That said, the season ends about an episode and a half past where it probably should have, on a particularly ugly cliffhanger when there were a few better cliffhangers they could have ended it on just slightly earlier. And there are two scenes, one in (I think) the first episode and one in the last episode of the season that are needlessly exploitative (not the best description) of a teen girl.

Girl is moments away from being raped by an alien probe, with alien tech-penis visibly inching towards her in the first episode. In the last episode of the season, same girl who has now regularly been a self sufficient ass kicker gets cornered in a mixed hot springs and for arbitrary reasons suddenly can't defend herself as she begins to be assaulted. Her head is held under the water as it cuts to black and the season ends. Just yuck. Apparently in the manga it's not even the end of a chapter, so the anime runners went out of their way to end the season on that.

That said, part of the inciting incidents of the show is a ghost stealing the male mc's penis. So it's not entirely one sided in terms of the sexual ick, but it seems to dwell on the shit against the female characters like it wants that to be titilating. There's no cheesecake/fanservice shots of the male MC mid-sexual assault, but there are of the female characters.

And is now illegal, thankfully.

Out of curiosity I've tried the AI feature in Paint (on my work computer) to erase something and use AI to fill in the background

I was removing a line between two items on a flowchart, background had diagonal colored lines in a regular repeating pattern (think college ruled paper at an angle).

Instead of connecting the lines in the background it seemed to just take an average of the pixel colors of the edge of what I erased and fill it in with that average color. Such intelligence!

You're telling me an egg fried this rice?

... most places outside of major cities? I'm seeing ~$580k in some of the upper middle class new construction neighborhoods in my area.

And with how much companies like Microsoft are shoving AI features into everything, it's a constant battle for well meaning sysadmins to keep busybody management types from getting enough force together to push through enabling this shit.

They all see it as a "no manpower required" thing that can just be switched on and used as a feather in their cap. "Look! I did a thing! For free!"

I'll let you in on some reality about sysadmins: we generally don't care what you're doing until it causes problems. Clearly this guy's amount of traffic did.

So yeah, absolutely. This is normal and reasonable.

It has to be against the rules for situations exactly like this where OP should be using a seedbox. But generally, they have better things to do than track down every little minor rule abuse.

Like playing their own pirated games while wfh. Or fixing other problems. Most teams of people who support shit like this are understaffed.

For instance, I'm sure that people are using my work network for all sorts of shit. I've seen people streaming Netflix to their desks. We lock down what we can, and don't worry about shit until we have to because it's causing a problem. Like years ago when someone streamed Netflix at an old location with I think only a T1 connection, saturated the network connection, and then no one could access anything on the network.

Most people don't go around looking for reasons to enforce the rules. They use them when they have to because there's a problem.

And that's the only reason I'm even vaguely considering picking up a Switch 2 around launch.

That said, even with a gen 1 Switch, booting into the CFW is just enough of a pain that I don't do it often. Gotta grab the shim for the rail, plug it into something that can deliver the payload... ugh.

I miss the days of Wii and PSP homebrew. No online shit to get banned from, no special booting techniques. 3DS cfw came pretty close in terms of ease of use.

That said, being able to pirate games directly from the 3DS and Switch was a big step up from having to transfer files over to the memory card (PSP) or effectively needing a dedicated external HDD/partition (Wii). Even if it was slow as hell and couldn't use my full internet speed.