If the speedrun strategy is “introduce a stupid law, wait for everyone to go ‘holy shit none of this can be realistically implemented in this timeframe’, wait for OS vendors to just ban the use of the OSes in the country, watch the local industry as a whole to rally and petition the government to stop the madness before there’s a new dark age, repeal the clearly stupid law”, all before the California law comes to effect - I’ve got to say it’s a bold strategy and we’ll see how it plays out.

Edit: Also, not going to upvote a Lunduke video - I’m glad he crams every bit of substantial information in the thumbnails so I can just not listen to him at all

As pointed out, Goodreads has been owned by Amazon for a good while. And they also own slices of some other similar book sites (LibraryThing, for example, and some other site that was merged into Goodreads).

Also, to avoid doing unpaid labour for Jeff Bezos, go from Goodreads to Bookwyrm!

What I need is “this post really seemed like a good idea when I was drunk, but in retrospect, maybe it’s not”.

The official Xbox 360 rechargeable batteries were absolute hogwash. Terrible battery life when they were new, and it just kept getting even worse really fast.

I could imagine the third party batteries being better. I’ve only ever had one set of Xbox One/Series controller rechargeable batteries (third party but AFAIK officially licensed) and they’re working just fine.

My current annoyance: my Xbox 360 works just fine, but none of the controllers turn on while battery powered. (IR remote works, but it’s not exactly suitable for gaming.) And Xbox 360 was the pinnacle of Microsoft’s “well we have to do slightly incompatible shit just for the hell of it” attitude - you can’t just use a standard USB cable, it uses USB over a weird proprietary connector. (On the other hand, I’ve looooooved Xbox One and later controllers on PC, they have standard plugs)

My Halloween tradition is Bullet Witch - had to jank up the PC version to working state last year when I first noticed this problem with the 360 controllers.

Edit: Oh wow, I managed to find a 360 controller battery holder that actually works. Geometry Wars Evolved 2 status: got the first cheevo

Really interesting, because just a while ago I remembered my experience of playing VGA Planets at the local BBS during my school years in early-mid 1990s. (This is a turn based game where people would submit their turn files, the arbitrator software thing would do its thing weekly, and we’d download the results.) The sysop was a classmate and, since the international money transfers were complicated for school kids at the time, organised getting everyone a registered copy in bulk. I do remember I said something in global messages and people thought it was, in modern vernacular, cringe. I don’t remember how the game ended up. I played some underwhelming race. I can’t remember.

A candy that plays music while you eat it

This is the sort of misapplication of technology that traumatised me as a kid, dammit

Back when the original Tux drawing was made, we didn’t have boot partitions. In LILO days, the bootloader barely fit in the MBR and the kernel was located and loaded with sheer magic incomprehensible to most mortals. So that’s why Tux has no shoes.

Wherever you are on Mastodon, back up your data!

Dear lazyweb (or lazystodon or lazyverse), are there dead simple scripts for periodic backup? You know, something you just authorise to act as a client and then stick into a crontab to run daily/weekly and it’ll keep a local copy of your stuff. Preferably something you can just install via pip or gem or (oh please gods no) npm.

This is kind of a side note, but in addition to Pico-8 I also recommend checking out TIC-80. Has an Android build on F-Droid.

It is a platform very similar to Pico-8, but it also has integration to the website where people post their projects. Just type “surf” to browse and download and play games automatically.

Boomers in the 1980s: “Those damn robots took our darn jorbs”

Trump in 2025: “We’re giving these jorbs to the robots”

Why do anything? Isn’t existence pointless?

Nintendo is making downloading ROMs mildly annoying.

Meanwhile, ripping discs yourself, ensuring checksums match with Redump, compressing them to RVZ and keeping the collection straight in Dolphin is kinda fun. And best of all, Nintendo can’t do shit about it.

Edit: Also happy I could preserve my old GameCube memory cards (using GCMM) and my Wii’s flash memory. While dumping the Virtual Console titles, I found some wild shit.

I would suggest getting a Wii, but not for playing the games. Softmod it (pretty trivial) and install CleanRip.

Then just start collecting Wii and GameCube games, rip them to USB/SD card, and play them on PC with Dolphin. Use just about any PC compatible controller for GameCube games, and you can pair the Wii controller over Bluetooth for Wii games.

Last I checked Wiis are pretty cheap, and the GC and Wii library has a lot of real gems.

Forever ago, Steam added like 1 minute of playtime on games I literally installed once and never played, so I was a little bit apprehensive. Anyway, I figured that was in the past now. I was also encouraged to do this after noticing that Steam’s cloud save was more than happy to just fetch save data from games I’ve literally not touched for 10 years.

Nah. Tried to imply that everyone has sex. Even if you’re not thinking about it. (Especially if you’re not thinking about it.)

It’s a Unix derivative. To get the fundamental software thing working, someone has likely had hot gay sex. To get the modern software going, someone has had hot transgender sex, hawt furry yiff, and autistic sexual intercourses. …What I’m getting at, sex won’t make Arch unbootable. Guess you just personally fucked up somewhere.

Times New Roman is wayyyy too classy for Trump Administration. They should switch to Comic Sans MS.

…Oh no, I’m re-heating font jokes that people older than me found funny decades ago. What has this present political climate reduced us to?

My first instances were mastodon.lol and kbin.social. Guess I was unlucky.

“We’re building the Eschaton Immanentising Machine, from the famous theological treatise ‘Don’t Immanentise the Eschaton’”

(Also, using LLMs sounds a lot less efficient than the exhaustive search described in The Nine Billion Names of God)