You’re not alone. I recall getting sniped from every direction at some points, with very tough 1:1 battles and boss battles that just kinda “happen” out in the open.

Possibly? Or maybe people will think twice about deadnaming you.

Just automatically started uploading everything on my hard drive to an account I didn’t set up

Wait, what?

Real question here: has anyone else had luck side-stepping the Live365 signup during/after install? I’ve done this, and I’m very confused that more people haven’t.

Thanks for the encouragement!

I have a question. Would age be at all a factor in the vibe? How about acute arthritis and being a newbie? I wouldn’t expect to just “fit in” immediately, but I’m left wondering if a slower middle-aged dude would have a hard time hanging with that crowd.

Hate that my government is apparently dead set on all of us driving massive trucks and SUVs spending thousands to money lenders, auto manufacturers, and dealerships over realist vehicles.

Doubly so if those parties are campaign contributors. Always follow the money.

Never understood the appeal honestly.

Same here. I spent about 30 minutes trying to play one (DoTA I think?) and figured out:

• Each hero has a zillion upgrades and abilities
• Each hero is basically on their own roguelite style upgrade path
• The game has a dozen or more such heroes
• icons and text too small to play on livingroom TV, controller play out of the question
• at mercy of online match-making algorithm if I’m not in a league/clan/whatever

From this I could deduce:

• There’s no way in hell this is perfectly balanced - too many variables, it may as well be MttG
• Going to take 20 or more hours to dial in a personal play style
• Going to take probably 50-100 to develop a play style that can adapt to most situations
• League play will probably kick my ass, requiring another 50-100 hours of practice/training
• Causal play is out; likely can’t pick up and play immediately due to lobby, variable match times

I’m not knocking the genre as a whole, but this is not for me. It’s too far outside my typical mode of gaming and is likely to just frustrate me more than anything else. I’m familiar with hard to play online games like Quake, TF2, and even Soldat. But those have small power systems that, even with gross imbalances, were still playable because there were usually only one or two scenarios you couldn’t overcome. Adding more on every axis just sounds like a wildly unbalanced system where the skill curve isn’t steep enough, costing a lot of time invested in bad strategies before you figure it all out.

Computer, set a sexy course for the sexiest year…

Wait, Oreos are actually bad?

I can only think of two plausible interpretations of this concept.

1. Mage is broke as hell and cobbled together his own grimoire by hand-copying spells from the college library, friends, and the occasional dungeon find. Yeah, a few occult incantations slipped in there, but you’d hardly notice for all the doodles and random “todo” lists from years ago.

2. Death note.

Either way

can also get a gun and blast these things before it gets out of hand

Honestly, I get the distinct impression that everything in the hunting section at your local Walmart is going to be woefully ineffective. May I recommend a defensive position with difficult to traverse stairs?

I don’t think this would work as a tourist draw in the conventional sense. The problem is that money doesn’t change hands enough times to generate enough secondary revenue and taxes, since everyone is “locked in” for the duration and the ticket sales happen online (or somewhere else). Typical hotels draw people to business and tourism all over the city, and this proposal is the opposite of that. Just like a typical cruise, this puts the cruise-liner in position to run their own tax free economy/experience for guests during their entire stay; just build everything into the ticket price.

Then you add the fact that an aging and immobile cruise ship is permanently occupying a deep-sea launch/slip in your harbor. That mooring point is no longer generating anywhere near as much income as before, since people are coming/going at a much more lax pace and you can’t use it for freight. And moving the ship around to accommodate other boats is likely going to require tugs which is time consuming and probably a huge PITA for the harbor.

Now, if you could anchor it somewhere remote where none of that matters, then you’d have something.

More like: it’s eventually going to break your weekend or even your whole week, but you don’t get to pick which one.

Edit: To put that in perspective, there are 260 working days in a year. Let’s say that you have just one of these hardware failures in a five-year career with the MTA. That’s roughly 1/1000 odds. If the lottery had chances like that, you’d play it every time.

My theory: the system they purchased was based on an older and proven design for railway automation and control. Add to that however said company/contractor was set up to support their customers (e.g. OS only ships on floppy). That said, I agree that ten years without so much as a drive upgrade is a bit long in the tooth for something that can kill people or become a logistic and/or political disaster if it malfunctions.

This is interesting. The longevity of this legacy tech may be secure if they use the right channels.

SoCal happens to have a very active retro-computing scene right now, much of which is in the bay area. If they can breathe life into an Apollo Guidance Computer, bog-standard floppy drives will be a piece of cake.

On the other hand, the same scene has modern emulation for just about every (popular) legacy media format imaginable. Upgrading the drives to use SD cards and USB thumbdrives is something they could buy off the shelf today: Apple II, C64, Tandy, misc. So there’s no reason to suffer through hardware failures when more reliable tech is available.

There are even commercial options out there. Example: https://www.shopfloorautomations.com/hardware/floppy-connect/

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_hardware_emulator

There’s also the concept of “build to sell” instead of “build to last.” Longevity of a company is not a consideration when the vulture venture capitalists see a bigger return in pawning off their investment instead of reaping dividends. Sadly, this outlook isn’t always knowable by everyone in said company. In my experience, it’s usually impossible to tell unless the company is already in the red or is about to be.

Apologies, I should have clarified. VGA plus CRT. I only ever used VGA with LED panels for a very short time, so I tend to conflate all the old tech as a package deal.

No worries, just eject the lead from a cheap Bic mechanical pencil, and use the tip to carefully bend 'em back into shape.

I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop on USB-C/Thunderbolt. Don’t get me wrong - I think it’s a massive improvement for standardization and peripheral capability everywhere. But I have a hard-used Thinkpad that’s on and off the charging cable all day, constantly getting tugged in every possible direction. I’m afraid the physical port itself is going to give up long before the rest of the machine does. I’m probably going to need Louis Rossmann level skills to re-solder it when the time comes.

Edit: I’m also wondering if the sudden fragility of peripheral connections (e.g. headphones, classic iPod, USB mini/micro) and the emergence of the RoHS standard (lead-free solder) is not a coincidence.