Bink videos were the hot shit for games for a while, and RAD Game Tools started a whole era of standardization for multimedia processes that culminated in DirectX. With computing power increasing along with the market share of PCs, using standardized libraries for audio & video drivers became the sensible thing to do. Previously you had games programmers eking out every iota of performance by fine tuning that stuff at an assembly level (the Origin games with their memory managers and Chris Sawyer’s amazing if kind of insane feat in creating Transport Tycoon come to mind).

It’s probably going to be cold hamberders again anyway.

God, the first music files I downloaded were MIDI and Soundtracker .MOD files using a 14,400k modem & BBS. That was after upgrading from my PC/XT to a 486/SX 25…those were the days.

Time to finally get off the “stuff” and go into rehab. And get some flowers to apologize to your aunt.

Break Gas? Never heard that expression before. I always thought it was “break wind”. 😆💨

Be sure to take that gun with you on your transatlantic flights so you can shoot your way out of the airport when the American Gestapo come for you. 👍

They really should have learned from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants

Third degree burns are NO JOKE, particularly in such a sensitive area. If you google around a little you can see the burns on the leg of Simone Evans, another plaintiff vs. Starbucks in a similar, ongoing case (NSFW!)

Good guy HAL, making sure you learn your craft.

That’s what I always do since there are decent options available nowadays.

Homemade pizza. Making the dough creates a mess and requires delicate manual labor in several steps at precise times over more than 24 hours. Looks great on YouTube but that’s just not me.

Edit: thanks for the suggestions, guys. Who knows, maybe one day… 😉

It’s bad for your metabolism.

Of course he would. Pigs of a leather grunt together.

Re the 1st amendment, sure. But the 2nd amendment link between weapon ownership and defense of freedom has been comprehensively nullified by the United States Supreme Court (via gross judicial overreach in their 2008 decision on DC v. Heller).

Finger bang bang into your life!

Seriously though, my experience with requesting a name change from the university IT dept. has been very positive.

Hard pass. He would just use the opportunity to rant at our diplomats like he did with Zelenskyy. We wouldn’t want to sign any deals with a criminally insane dictator anyway.

The bond is broken, the ship has sailed. Time for us to pursue a Europe First strategy. Post haste, preferably.

And it’s not just investments into military hardware we need to make but also pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, etc. We need to become independent as soon as possible.

The groundwork is there. We can do it if we really want. MEGA will beat MAGA, and screw Trump and his puppet master.

Oh he has poor English ability. Very poor. The poorest English, I mean, some people say “Trump why are you so poor at English?” and he says “I know, that’s why the made me president.”

What, Russian?

Cool idea but human beings crave identity. And gender is an important way to express identity. I think that might be one of the reasons why some people feel so threatened by the existence of non-cis gendered people. Refusing to conform to preconceived notions of identity-by-gender challenges their sense-making processes, inducing anxiety.

Plus, our entire human race is reliant on the attraction between the sexes. Gender isn’t easily extricable from that. A manly man will always have an easier time finding a woman.

I like the spirit of human first but I fear it might not be as simple as that.

Thank you for calling attention to this. To answer your question, I try to avoid toxic people. To be honest I still have some deeply rooted beliefs about manhood myself that are similarly hurtful to the ones you named.

So I don’t know, really. But I’ve been working on myself and on being happy with who I am. It’s definitely paying dividends but I still have some ways to go.

I’ve sometimes thought that things would be much easier if I were gay because I’d fit the mould in many ways. Except for the most important one, as I’m just not into dudes at all and very much like to be with women.

Having observed other men through my almost 50 years of life, I find that many are probably just masking their sensitivity behind a veil of foul language, aggressive behavior, and machismo. Those men I find particularly hard to bear.

Yeah, I’m mostly a single player kind of guy, so I enjoy my games like Return of the Obra Dinn, Dredge, Balatro, Dave the Diver, etc.

From what I hear, some older multiplayer titles can be made to run using cracks and some kind of VPN.