Y|yukichigai

And wow! I totally thought those servers went down. I would have bet money that I remember reading about it.

EverQuest’s servers were slated to go down at least once, but that was when the then-current now-former owners no longer wanted the IP and were trying to sell it. It was less “we are taking them down” and more “we don’t want to spend anymore money keeping these up, but if someone else wants to we’ll sell for a good price.” Someone bought them and the servers stayed up. The game still makes money apparently.

EverQuest is still going. So is Ultima Online. My wife’s EQ account from launch is still there with all her characters and goodies. As for the others, people were upset when those were shut down. People definitely weren’t “totally fine” with that.

There’s another aspect though, in that with MMOs you are paying monthly for a service, and an actual quantifiable one. The servers that run those MMOs (current ones anyway) aren’t light pieces of computer equipment that you could easily run in your home. It’s like going to a bar with a cover charge: you could talk to people at home or drink at home, but you’re paying for doing that at a place with some neat decorations and a lot more people than you’re likely to meet at your home.

Expanding that metaphor, singleplayer games are you drinking at home. People do not want to give the liquor store the right to come into your liquor cabinet and take back the booze if they decide you no longer should have it.

Because of the second “M” in the term, i.e. “Multiplayer”. MMOs are as much about the community as the game. For some they’re more important than the game. MMOs generally only get shut down when almost all of the community has left… or in other words when a lot of the game’s “content” is no longer available anyway.

That’s not the case for singleplayer games, or games designed for local/couch multiplayer. There’s no natural limit on the game being playable. For PS2/Xbox era stuff and before, as long as you have game and the hardware you can fire it up today and have the same experience (not counting your worsening reflexes). There’s no justifiable reason why a company should be allowed to decide that you can no longer play the game you bought on hardware you physically possess. The only reason is greed, pure and simple. That’s why people aren’t okay with it.

Annnnnnnnd this is my new forever name for it.

It’s medically relevant information. If you’re incapacitated, this could be vital information to whoever treats you.

This one is overlooked and can be literally a matter of life and death. Certain medications react differently based on hormone levels for example, so even if someone was born male if they have a nominally female balance of hormones they need to be treated (medically) as female.

The people a Youdontsurf are going to be devastated.

The beta launcher has a bunch of features disabled/absent compared to the main launcher, not the least being the shopping cart. Not surprising that it would load faster when it has less to do.

Despite the apparent speed of advances, AI is a technology that is still in its childhood. It’s as if tech companies found a way to create a 6-year-old out of GPUs and way too goddamn much electricity. If you can overlook the resource usage required, that’s kind of cool.

The problem is that those same tech companies (and some governments) have decided that they all need their own synthetically created 6-year-old and that they should give it unlimited funding and the ability to make life-changing decisions for everyone else, and anyone who isn’t jumping at the chance to have their life overseen by a machine-generated child with poor impulse control and a propensity to hallucinate is just “getting in the way of progress”.

That movie is so damn good. Every other film adapting a comic book has to make it either an origin story or some major event in canon. Dredd is literally “this is a slightly unusual but not that abnormal day for this guy” and it’s absolutely riveting. And that’s how the Dredd universe is: everything is intense and over-the-top.

Same. As far as I’m concerned that film is a depiction of what happens if you enter The Warp without a Gellar Field.

When I first saw the movie I was very unhappy because it was not at all what was advertised. I was expecting a sci-fi thriller, not Hellraiser in Space. It was quite badly marketed. If it had been marketed correctly it might’ve done far better.

Japanese, German, American, British…

I mean this positively: current AIs come up with the most bizarre, insane shit. Sometimes that’s great: a new approach or perspective when trying to solve a problem or interpret data can be exactly what is required to actually accomplish the task. Other times it’s unhelpful, but often so unhelpful it can be hilarious if the stakes are low-to-nonexistent.

That said, that’s exactly why they need to not be as ever-present as they are: by human standards they are literally insane, incapable of consistent reasoning and frequently perceiving the world in ways that do not match reality. It’s not accurate to say the technology is in its infancy, but at best it’s in its adolescence, and just like an 8-year-old it should not be put in charge of dangerous things like drone strikes or ambulance dispatch.

Modding Bethesda’s Gamebryo engine games, especially Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, and especially doing so using only the built-in functions, i.e. no FOSE/NVSE. Not that I’m averse to using them, but I prefer to do what I can without them before I do. Thanks to that approach I had little trouble making Fallout 4 mods that could run on console editions of the game.

It was simple once I figured out what I needed, but I had to cycle through a few different OSes before I got something that worked with my hardware. You might have luck with a “specifically for emulation” build like Lakka or Batocera, but for me I wound up installing Debian 12 and then having it just auto-login and run RetroPie on start. Works great though.

Anywho, best of luck!

7th Doctor if memory serves.

“The reverse is also true.” - The Doctor

My Father-in-Law picked up a smart doorbell that did actually hook up to the existing analog system. Works great. It’s certainly possible.

I took an old 2007 ultrabook and made it into a media and retro game station for the break room at work. It’s a 32-bit Core Duo - not even Core 2 - but that’s enough to play H264 video and basically any emulated game through the 4th console generation (SNES/Genesis) and some early parts of the 5th (e.g. some of the 2D PS1 games). Been a great hit at work.

Doesn’t sound like they’re going to backport this unfortunately. Damn shame: I absolutely love The Division but having it on Steam means I have to run two launchers to play it. It usually works… usually.

Itchy and Scratchy Money only in real life.

Simpsons already did it.