Random non sequitur posts catch-all thread

Prederick wrote:
Tscott wrote:

Bet their onlyfans page has a lot of subs.

Oh for f*ck's sake I JUST GOT THIS.

I was today years old when I got this joke.

I've been informed that American cheese filled hot dogs exist. I've never had them. They sound horrible. I want to try one.

A restaurant just opened in my neighborhood called "JAPS BURGER".

In Excel, I don't think I have EVER hit the right button when trying to add/remove decimals. It doesn't make sense that the left arrow adds a decimal and the right arrow removes one. I mean I get the logic but it's not intuitive to me.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

I've been informed that American cheese filled hot dogs exist. I've never had them. They sound horrible. I want to try one.

I've never had one either. I love cheese but it has a time and a place. Can't ever think of when I'd want cheese on a sausage, or Chinese food, or fish. (And yet, tuna melts exist which I'm not a fan of).

PaladinTom wrote:
tuffalobuffalo wrote:

I've been informed that American cheese filled hot dogs exist. I've never had them. They sound horrible. I want to try one.

I've never had one either. I love cheese but it has a time and a place. Can't ever think of when I'd want cheese on a sausage, or Chinese food, or fish. (And yet, tuna melts exist which I'm not a fan of).

Definitely had similar growing up in the midwest. Simultaneously makes my mouth water and my stomach hurt to think about eating them.

PaladinTom wrote:
tuffalobuffalo wrote:

I've been informed that American cheese filled hot dogs exist. I've never had them. They sound horrible. I want to try one.

I've never had one either. I love cheese but it has a time and a place. Can't ever think of when I'd want cheese on a sausage, or Chinese food, or fish. (And yet, tuna melts exist which I'm not a fan of).

1) Cheese dogs are delicious. However, I prefer Hillshire Farms to the Oscar Mayer variety.

2) A properly prepared Tuna Melt is one of the world's greatest sandwiches.

I know nothing except the fact of my own ignorance.

ThatGuy42 wrote:
PaladinTom wrote:
tuffalobuffalo wrote:

I've been informed that American cheese filled hot dogs exist. I've never had them. They sound horrible. I want to try one.

I've never had one either. I love cheese but it has a time and a place. Can't ever think of when I'd want cheese on a sausage, or Chinese food, or fish. (And yet, tuna melts exist which I'm not a fan of).

1) Cheese dogs are delicious. However, I prefer Hillshire Farms to the Oscar Mayer variety.

2) A properly prepared Tuna Melt is one of the world's greatest sandwiches.

How do I like only half a post? I need a half-like button!

Mixolyde wrote:
ThatGuy42 wrote:
PaladinTom wrote:
tuffalobuffalo wrote:

I've been informed that American cheese filled hot dogs exist. I've never had them. They sound horrible. I want to try one.

I've never had one either. I love cheese but it has a time and a place. Can't ever think of when I'd want cheese on a sausage, or Chinese food, or fish. (And yet, tuna melts exist which I'm not a fan of).

1) Cheese dogs are delicious. However, I prefer Hillshire Farms to the Oscar Mayer variety.

2) A properly prepared Tuna Melt is one of the world's greatest sandwiches.

How do I like only half a post? I need a half-like button!

I've never had a Tuna Melt. Please send one to my house. I'll DM you my address.

Baron Of Hell wrote:

I know nothing except the fact of my own ignorance.

IMAGE(http://www.poorlydrawnlines.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/everything_you_know.png)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/pd5RSHD.jpg)

Agathos wrote:
Baron Of Hell wrote:

I know nothing except the fact of my own ignorance.

IMAGE(http://www.poorlydrawnlines.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/everything_you_know.png)

fenomas wrote:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/pd5RSHD.jpg)

One of Al’s “style parodies” in which he apes the wonderful They Might Be Giants’ sound from the early 90s.

It sort of offends me at a karmic level that Weird Al would name a song after a Firesign Theatre album and not make any references or homages or whatnot to them.

Yeah, but he totally nailed the TMBG vibe.

I think I’m gonna drink a bottle of wine tonight.

Dang! You’re gone get crunk!

Prederick wrote:

I've been doing a lot of cloud gaming lately, and because no one at all asked or cared, I have side-by-side impressions of three of the big streaming services: Stadia, Xbox Game Pass on Android, and PlayStation Now. (I haven't really done anything with GeForce Now since it's my understanding that it lets you play your existing PC library, and I have no PC library.)

Stadia seems to have the highest quality streaming technology. It's crisp and smooth and responsive enough that it's effectively seamless. Playing Hitman '16 on my computer that absolutely could not play Hitman, it looked and played like I was running the game natively on a nice PC. It also runs out of my web browser, which is a cool trick.

It supports mouse and keyboard as well as controllers, which is nice, and it also plays great on mobile with a controller. You can play on mobile with just touch controls, but it sucks. This is no fault of Stadia's; these games just weren't designed for that kind of play.

I haven't had a chance to try Stadia on my television because it requires you to buy a Chromecast Ultra. I'm not sure why that feels like an annoying barrier, but it does. Perhaps it's because the whole platform is streaming, so I don't really want to have to buy more hardware. Perhaps it's because plugging a dedicated streaming device into my television with a built-in streaming device just feels silly.

The big Achilles heel of Stadia is that the business model sucks. For $10 per month, you can subscribe to Stadia Pro and get a slow trickle of games that you need to claim while they're available for subscribers. Once you claim them, you get to keep them in your library, but they're only available to claim for a limited time. The freebies are also the usual mixed bag that freebie games are: some are classics that are actually classic; some are just old enough that their publishers give them away; and some are early access games trumped up as freebies to try to build an audience.

Otherwise, you can buy games for full price, which... No. I'm not dropping $60 to "own" a game only on a streaming platform from a company that shuts down projects on the regular. Not happening.

Xbox Game Pass on Android has more frequent technical hiccups than Stadia, but game still usually look and play nicely. I'm not sure if it's my phone or the service, but Game Pass seems a lot more location-sensitive than Stadia. Games are also slower to load on Game Pass versus Stadia. Games are also locked at Xbox-level performance; I'm fine with that, but you're not going to get the fancy 4K HDR visuals that Stadia promises.

Game Pass requires a controller but supports a variety of controllers from different manufacturers. There's no option for any kind of controller overlay on touchscreens, and that's actually fine by me. There are a couple games that support touch-controls (Minecraft Dungeons currently; the beta included Hellblade) but they actually get custom UIs and extra coding for touch input, so I don't expect that to be a common thing.

The great thing about Game Pass is the library. For a $15/mo. subscription fee, you get instant access to a couple hundred games to stream, and the catalog is really strong. It's nice to have access to a good selection of indies and big-name games alike. It's a trip to play Witcher 3, No Man's Sky, and Wasteland 3 on my phone. Of course, a Game Pass subscription also gives you many of these same games on Xbox or PC as part of your subscription, so unless you're a Nintendo and Sony exclusive household, you get more than just cloud gaming for your money.

Game save synchronization between console and cloud is automatic, so I've been able to pick up games I've been playing at home on my Xbox while I'm elsewhere on my phone without any hassle. It's also a nice way to try out a really large game before I commit to downloading it. Cloud games on Game Pass also support any DLC you've bought, so expansion packs and the like are there just like you'd expect.

The biggest downside to Game Pass streaming is that it's fairly limited in where you can play it. It's on Android, period. There's no console client or PC client. It'd be nice to have those platforms as an option for cloud gaming, especially since the text in games designed for TVs can sometimes get really squinty on a phone. (Game Pass is shut out of iOS, as well, but that's Apple's decision, not Microsoft's.)

PlayStation Now is the least stable of the cloud platforms I've tried. Some days it's pretty smooth, but other days it skips and stutters no matter what I do. The same connection that plays Stadia and Game Pass games smoothly will give me a lot of trouble on PlayStation Now. The PC client also seems to have a surprisingly large footprint so far as resource consumption goes. It wants to run in the background, but I keep forcing it to quit because it slows everything else down.

You can play PlayStation Now on console or PC. There's no mobile client at all which is a bummer. PlayStation Now also requires a DualShock 4 controller specifically, even if you're not streaming a PS4 game. That's not a big deal if you're streaming on your PS4, but it can be a nuisance on PC where games that require any kind of input from the touchpad (including clicking it) won't work. There are programs like reWASD that allow you work around this, but that's an additional expense and annoyance.

Your PlayStation Now subscription also allows you to download games onto your PS4 if you have one, but it's a lot more limited than Game Pass. PlayStation Now games don't support DLC, even if you own it, so expansion content that you can play on your console won't be available in the cloud. Worse, a lot of games won't let you load save files without DLC installed, so your game saves flat-out won't work for streaming on PlayStation Now. Game save synching is also a weirdly convoluted manual process.

Like Game Pass, though, the strength of PlayStation Now is in its library, and the library is huge and diverse. PlayStation Now has games from the PS2, PS3, and PS4, including PlayStation exclusives that you'd normally need to buy their hardware for, like Bloodborne or The Last of Us. The library isn't as fresh and exciting as Game Pass, but Sony has recently started rotating through some of their more recent releases like Spider-Man and God of War. If you're into Japanese games, the PlayStation Now library has a really strong collection of JRPGs and other more niche titles.

tl;dr:

  • Stadia - Great tech; sh*tty business model
  • Xbox Game Pass on Android - Nice library with new releases; frustrating platform limitations
  • PlayStation Now - Huge library with occasional big-name exclusives; sh*tty tech

Minor nitpick from resident Stadia White Knight: games that are only available for sale are often discounted significantly (usually 50%, sometimes less). Subscribers usually get better and more frequent discounts. I believe a few games are immune from discounts, though, probably a publisher decision.

Your point about "owning" a game on a platform from a company with a reputation being fickle still stands. Google has a ways to go to build trust from customers who expect them to drop the service if the going gets tough. I trust them, but I'm in the minority, at least among internet gamers.

BadKen wrote:

Minor nitpick from resident Stadia White Knight: games that are only available for sale are often discounted significantly. Subscribers usually get better and more frequent discounts. I believe a few games are immune from discounts, though, probably a publisher decision.

I haven't been on there long enough to see how the deals and discounts play out over time, but browsing through the store this morning, most things still seemed to be sold at MSRP. Discounts like the current Ubisoft sale are pretty much in line with discount prices on Xbox and PlayStation. I'll keep an eye out, though.

Prederick wrote:

The Twenty-first of September

I had the Earth Wind & Fire album Spirit when I was in high school and I played it until the grooves wore out. But, you might say, it's Earth Wind & Fire... their grooves never wear out! True enough, but I cued up that record pretty much every day when I came home from school. I think my parents may have wondered if their child was turning into an afro pop freak.

Fun fact: September was only ever released as a single, and on their first "Best Of" album.

This guy has been doing this for a few years now, check out his youtube channel:

BadKen wrote:

This guy has been doing this for a few years now, check out his youtube channel:

Heh, thanks for reminding me about this. One of those things I always enjoy and then completely forget about until it comes around again.

deftly wrote:

Heh, thanks for reminding me about this. One of those things I always enjoy and then completely forget about until it comes around again.

It's literally my favorite part about that bit. I'll wake up on September 21 and be like "......IT'S TODAY!!!"

A while back, Phishposer posted in Tech & Help about his 1080's dying a horrible death. He had it in his heart to give an electronics hobbyist a chance at doing some board repair. A competent one must not have been available at the time, because he sent it to me. It arrived today.

I took off the back panel first to look for any signs on the back of the board that a component had burnt on the other side. There was a sign in the area of the VRMs. Hrm.

Then I took the cooler off and found this carnage:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/ADoPm5N.jpg)

Note: No banana for scale. Believe it or not, these pictures are at a scale where things can't be measured in fruit.

Of course it was one of those damn SMD caps. That's not always a death sentence for the board, so I cleaned it and found:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/M0nlLkl.jpg)

PC145 where aaaare yooou?

Oh.

No.

There's no answer.

Also, somebody's been digging for copper. With thermite. Through that hole you can see a window to the underworld to which this card's soul escaped. This goes deep. Layers deep. As if that weren't enough, the logic chip next door was an unfortunate casualty as well.

Sorry to say this, but I can't save this one Phishposer. The best I can say is its parts will be used to revive others that are less mortally wounded.

I was having a rough day today, and this really cracked me up for some reason. I'm sorry it wasn't in better shape. I hope you have better luck on your next project!

Glad I could make your day a little better! Don't be sorry. There is a lot of useful stuff on that board, and I'm only a partial slouch at removing it when it's needed.

Oh no! Looks like you let the magic smoke escape.

Those are some sweet awsome close up pictures of circuit board carnage though, I'm 100% here for it.