@timberwolf.club
I have a weakness for isometric management games, obscure simulators, irrelevant details of long-dead memory addressing schemes and listening to "The Legend Of Xanadu" more times than is strictly age-appropriate.
On-foot permeabilty should be enforced by making it both physically possible and legal to whirl your arms and break down any structure preventing you from easily walking in a straight line between two otherwise accessible points, like a basher out of Lemmings.
The 1976 LP that the merry-go-round music for Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 and 2 is taken from.
(This is admittedly probably quite un-random given the intersection of my interests here.)
I have bought so many SD and CF card readers over the years and yet still am so unable to find any of them when I need one that I'm going to accept as an inherent property of the format that it has a read/write latency of 1-2 days and a cost of £10 every time you need to do it.
A grid showing the box art for 9 racing games: Assetto Corsa Wreckfest Gran Turismo 4 Gran Turismo 2 TrackMania United Forever Forza Horizon 4 Some sort of knockoff box for Sir Geoff of Crammond's Formula One Grand Prix The Need For Speed Grand Prix Legends
I'm not entirely sure this is stable (ask me in another time/mood and I'm fairly sure Richard Burns Rally and/or Dirt 3 would cycle in, and I'm ignoring a lot of ridiculous LAN fun playing 1nsane) but here we go, 9 racing games.
I should note I feel much less able to spot other models, but I think that's just how dominant GPT has become for slop text - pretty sure that as Gemini becomes more common its tells and writing style will become obvious too.
I suppose this is a bit like the realistic CGI thing where in the '90s it was incredible but a few years later even though the technology was better you were so attuned to the slight tells in lighting and movement anything but perfect CGI leapt out and looked out of place.
Fascinated by the idea that the Turing test is a moving target - there's text I see in the wild that 5 years ago I'd have said "has to be human" that these days I'd not only identify as a computer but also have a good hunch as to which version of GPT generated it.
Q: Are We Not Devo?
A: We Are Just Normal Men... We Are Just Innocent Men
Exit that doesn't open until you've collected some arbitrary number of MacGuffins strewn about the level?
I recall @yesterzine.bsky.social making the suggestion that the true successor to all these Winamp plugins is playing [Euro/American] Truck Simulator with the in-game radio enabled. www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqN...
I want to know if whoever trained GPT to constantly go "no foo, no bar, no baz–just quux" actually speaks like that in real life.
INT Olive Garden, early PM
"Would you like a starter?"
"You're absolutely right to ask that. Here it comes–no olives, no caprese, no calamari–just halloumi fritters"
The one which gets me is watching Dutch YouTubers presenting in English and they casually drop a pun complex enough that some native speakers don't get it.
I can barely get through a simple restaurant situation in either of my second languages!
We used to be able to get five teenage lads and associated bags into my 1987 VW Polo so we could drive to the local Pizza Hut for their unlimited buffet.
Admittedly, the car didn't have enough power to get into top gear in this configuration, especially on the return trip with a much heavier load.
One of the rare things I managed to keep is my Voodoo 2. Even at the time I was aware how utterly transformative it was for PC gaming. They've thankfully gone down a bit in recent years; I recall seeing a bare card go for £500 and wondering, given mine still has box, manuals and registration cards!
It's not even half ten on Monday and I've already come perilously close to uttering the phrase, "don't interfere with my Bros headcanon".
The last one I had "die" was fine from a hardware perspective, but a botched OTA update made it bootloop and the amount of hassle to get it fixed wasn't worth it for an LCD so old it didn't have "black levels" so much as "battleship grey levels"
... but I can see a niche for things like shared rentals when you're young, where one person by themselves isn't going to buy an 83" TV but a few housemates might club together on the rental with the bonus it doesn't have to be moved to a new house at the end of the tenancy.
Ah, the glory days of renting a TV where every few months they'd wheel away the old Finlandia and you'd get a new one with even more features. Not sure it works quite as well now the evolution is slower, the prices are cheaper and the things last basically forever (ours is 13 years old now) ...
It's one of those things where I can't remember a point I didn't enjoy it, although it did take a couple of interesting attempts cooking it for myself as a student before I realised the black "rind" on some of the pre-sliced varieties is in fact plastic.
I guess I should give a minor nod to Waitrose as the only one to have the desired item in stock - not in the correct size but I can live with having an excess (checks notes) 1.2kg of haggis.
Still looked like it was last cleaned in 2021 but I'll take "I could buy near enough the item I wanted"
M&S is so far ahead in terms of cleanliness, merchandising and navigability of the shop floor you'd think you were in a different country, but Lidl is massively punching above its weight for the price point there. They're managing to be a much nicer place to be than shops charging a *lot* more.
I have visited a ridiculous number of UK supermarkets attempting to procure a haggis and my assessment is:
Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury's: filthy, cramped stores that act like you should be punished for daring to shop in them.
M&S, Lidl, Asda: actual vaguely pleasant shopping experiences.
Me: "I really need to speed up this pop history, it's taking ages just to write a single month's worth by this point."
Also me: [writes 1500 words about "Doctorin' The Tardis"]
"Don't draw trains, don't use trains, don't even live near a railway, you will end up absorbing information whether you like it or not." -- me, 5 minutes ago.
Multiple people have recommended this to me and yes, it's a good watch - being in one of the industries most affected by LLMs I spend far too much of my day typing "that's not really true now, is it?" into some prompt or other.
Oh, cool! Performs well, too.
"Mismatched dinosaur socks. The best kind of socks." -- me, today.
Though I guess it's the fate of all "I am very smart" comments to display an overweening sense of pride in understanding a subject to a moderate secondary school level. (Without realising what simplifications were used to make it possible to teach that information to bored teenagers.)
One of the things I've noticed as someone with a slightly more than passing interest in linguistics is that almost every time I see one of those "you're saying it wrong" people, they're betraying the fact they have only the most surface-level, trivial understanding of the subject.
(Note: I lived too far south to know if this was a good or bad price for knickers in Leamington Spa at the time. Experts in the Midlands underwear economy of the late 1980s may wish to add their knowledge here. Or not.)
