would have really wanted that shirt. everything’s sold out :(

they really are horrible laptops, especially the ROG ones. Those things on day one you turn it on are like “alright, time to start killing myself”. you can keep all the fans constantly clean, repaste them every few months, and they’ll still cook themselves alive. and the AC adapter will die on you faster than the laptop itself. I had to replace the AC adapter on mine 3 times in 2 years.

Friends don’t let friends buy Asus laptops.

I got 3 6+ year old thinkpads that are all chugging along just fine. got them all for dirt cheap.

But as another person said keep that shit for as long as possible and learn how to properly maintain it. New stuff is absolutely horrible. I recently had an ASUS laptop that fried itself after 3 years. was getting really wonky 2 years in.

I always found AI art easy to spot. washed out/dull colours with usually heavy lines. That’s all I look at. So looking at this artists work it’s clear it isn’t AI to me at least.

extremely low hanging fruit. I travel a lot for work and all my laptops have VPNs with encrypted DNS. Even had to set that up on one of my FreeBSD installs (which was a god damn pain and with the shit wifi on that there really wasn’t much of a point at the end of the day).

it’s even more mandatory for places that have NO captive portals. Those connections are opening themselves up to a can of worms. Looking at you Union Station in Toronto Canada. seriously, fix your shit. One of the biggest transit hubs in all of Canada and their wifi is completely 100% open.

same. I really liked playing it but like you it never really hooked me in to finish playing it. The mechanics are great but the story is sort of meh.

The game mechanics though are a lot of fun. like navel combat in space. There was another online game a few years ago which was the same, Dreadnaughts. THAT game was awesome but it just never could maintain a playerbase. It had the same gameplay style except it had settings that were both in space and in the atmosphere of planets.

I recently saw a video of Zuckerberg being interviewed by Theo Von and I honestly thought it was AI slop at first. The way he sits, talks, even moves his head it’s like he’s constantly under interrogation. It’s like some PR manager spent a couple days with him teaching him how to act and the dude took it way too literally.

Zuck has never had an original idea in his head, ever. His initial claim to fame, prior to FB, at least on college campus’ was making a “hot or not” clone utilizing photos from various Harvard facebooks. Every idea since then has been someone elses or he’s tried to take the Apple approach of “let someone else do it first, then we improve on it” except he has never been able to nail down the second part. The only reason FB became successful was the initial exclusivity and it filled the gap of a post 20-something myspace/ICQ/AOL IM world.

DC/PS2/Xbox/GC

you had a ton of options, many more exclusives, and there was competition with pricing. also because of the fact that games would release on all the consoles sometimes some of the games would have “incentives” to buy a game on a certain console. exclusive characters or levels or what have you. Soul Calibur 2 comes to mind. Outside of Xbox online play was free. Q3A on the Dreamcast using a mouse and keyboard was right up there, if not better, than playing Q3A on the PC. Phantasy Star online was another great online game. PS2 had awesome online games like SOCOM or Final Fantasy XI. Plus the SOCOM headset was actually a damn good gaming headset.

Other than the early PS3/360/Wii days I think it was the last best generation of console gaming.

the other week I found a Windows 11 install USB I had in the back of a drawer. I decided “meh let me install this on a separate 250gb drive and see how it is, it’s been awhile since I used windows” massive. mistake.

I created a MS account and was immediately slammed with microsoft spam. sign up for this ,sign up for that, buy this, buy that, etc etc etc. immediately, i hadn’t even finished the install. next the updates. constant and slow. reboot after reboot as certain updates wouldn’t work unless a previous one was installed. drivers that wouldn’t install unless an MS update was installed first. AND then to top off the pain of it all Windows decided “hey i’m gonna update your bios while I’m here” and borked that to the point where now the FN keys on the laptop I used are now “backwards” affecting my other linux installs on the machine.

never again. it was an awful experience and once it had finished updating everything I immediately nuked the drive.

honestly wasn’t worth it. in the 90s you either had enough money to get one of those dual VHS recorders or you had two VHS players that you somehow wired up to each other to do it. you still had to pay for the blank tapes so I mean you’d rent a tape for like $3 but you’d be spending more just to have a copy of it. In many cases it was just cheaper to either record from a tv broadcast or just wait for the rental place to take the product off the shelf and sell it used.

and even when DVD-Rs came out that was still expensive. The blank discs weren’t cheap and the drive itself was expensive. Add to the fact that burned DVDs just don’t last anywhere near as long as pressed DVDs. I thought I was smart burning Dreamcast games but I’d end up having to reburn them every couple years. THEN consider the fact that many people just simply didn’t know how to burn DVDs correctly so good luck getting one to play on everyones player perfectly.

Primus Sucks.

i mean all companies have to do is just bring back self-hosting servers and dedicated servers. literally ALL they have to do is bring back the multiplayer of the late 90s/early 00s. that’s it.

I mean hell I still play on old UT servers for 99 and 2k4. I still play on TFC and Q3A servers. it’s simple but it’s fun.

Fuzion Frenzy was an awesome 4 player party game. had so much fun with my friend playing that. and Crimson Skies was excellent. the Multiplayer was right up there with the first Mechassault.

And please bring back Mechassault. Best multiplayer MechWarrior game ever IMHO.

wipEout, Jeanne d’arc, Battlefront, locorocco, peace walker, Ys seven, Mega Man Powered Up, Gran Turismo, Dissida, Final Fantasy Tactics, Ghosts of Sparta

what kind of games do you want to play? I have a PS Vita that is loaded with old school roms. can play pretty much everytihng up to like the Dreamcast. NES, Master System, SNES, Genesis, N64, PSX, PSP, etc.

that bad huh?

found the vibe coder. hey bud, how’s that “killer app” scaling for you?

hell my PC struggled with Q3A in '99. most PCs did.

knew this was coming. it’s Apple’s MO since…like…ever since the company started. Let someone else do it first and then try to do it better. HP is already doing this, Apple is going to “improve it”.