haha, I’m 45, so you don’t have to explain the pre-Internet-ubiquity world to me, but I appreciate it. My first car was from 1982, which I got in 1995. I had a big boom box in the back seat that took D cell batteries. (Because it had no radio and I didn’t have money to buy one, but I had the boom box already.) I get the appeal, I just mean to say that there are people who do make their own cars. And while they make incredibly impressive and even outlandish things, I’m pretty certain they could also make you a very basic car, for a price. And probably a lot less than most new cars. They’ll just want the money to front is all. And there’s probably not much in the way of guarantees.

Yeah, a lot of gamers know nothing about any of this conversation. I mean, my coworkers who game and mentioned the Stream Machine this weekend. Of course one was talking Fortnite. So that’s where we’re at. I didn’t even get into why this “console” won’t have one of the more popular games that’s literally free on every other machine including their phone. (I can already hear people saying “is a computer! It should run everything!” And then getting together when you explain how, and saying “it should be simple! It’s a console!”) It’s months away at best anyway. Who knows.

I think the hope isn’t that “maybe this will be big enough”, but “maybe together they’ll be big enough”. Who knows, though. It got a lot of hype on reveal but people are fickle sometimes.

What you want to look into is body kits. It’s taking a car, removing parts, and putting on replacements that have fittings that attach the same, but look completely different on the outside. There are many types of cars that have become the most popular to customize and have the most options, but tons of cars can be changed significantly. There are even some body kits that change everyday cards into looking like completely different cards (“kit cars”, I think they’re called), and lawsuits around some similarities of body kits. There’s also tons of YouTubers that do videos on this, and a whole culture about it. Usually they go for more flashy, and more tech, but you can probably go the other way pretty easily too depending on your taste.

It’s completely possible to do as a hobby if you have time and money, and more possible to GET done if you have lots of money. Honestly I have no idea about it. But my cousin is a car guy and I stayed with him for a few months earlier this year. Damned interesting stuff out there.

I respect where you’re coming from, but a) “fool” is literally in my name. And b) you’re saying “there are other good games, leave those games you’re enjoying.” But you’re also saying “there are other people, leave your friends and family that you play with.” And that’s a little different.

Kernel level anti-cheat is what’s probably going to keep me on Windows for a while. I get those games aren’t for everyone, but I like them well enough, and that’s what my friend group plays. Warzone, DMZ, and going to try RedSec tomorrow. Kind of a shame. Otherwise I’d love to make the jump. As it is I’ll probably see about dual booting when I get my next PC in a year or two.

It reminds me of when Google added everyone’s phone numbers to search. Everyone freaked out. “What do you mean anyone can find my number?!” And this is back when phone books were ubiquitous.

It’s pointless now as anyone actually making a call (scammers) buys numbers from providers or other thieves. But it’s really interesting how publicly available data being more publicity available can be scary.

Delta Force has a Battlefield-ish multiplayer mode. It’s free to play and you unlock new characters and guns as you advance. (Then there’s an extraction mode too if you’re into that.) I just tried it for the first time after the beta several months ago and I thought it was alright. No jets, but still solid.

I can’t go that far. I can’t be upset at people for looking at deals and NOT thinking “but what about the companies?” Granted this hits differently as a field I love, but still, I get it.

Even wilder to me is that they own the *.new TLD. So they have shortcuts like sheets.new and doc.new, which take you to those respective documents in Google Focs. And that’s neat for people using them, and unfortunate for literally everyone else in the world who might want to make a fun *.new domain.

After I made my comment I saw someone else make a comment about getting a message saying that. I never did. Mine just worked. Weird.

That’s the old way of handling it. (And I think it still works.) They have a new implementation that’s just the family group admin sending an invite and the recipient accepting.

Some scenes in MW2 stick out so strongly to me still.

You got lots of downvotes, but assuming you’re earnest, the game has a reputation of being rife with cheaters. Here’s a popular video that showed how bad it was a couple of years ago: https://youtu.be/p5LfGcDB7Ek

There’s also lots of allegations about the developers not being great people, which you can read in this thread. I have no idea about that, though. But complaints are not rare.

This is why I loved the DMZ mode of Warzone when it launched. The stronger bots were mother fuckers but there were missions to finish, so the players (all fresh from Warzone and new to having prox chat,) were mostly carefully happy to talk and often helped each other. It got pretty sweaty over the next two seasons though. After that it was kill on sight.

A few weeks ago, soon after they spun it off to its own download apart from Warzone, someone cracked it for solo play. I’d love someone figuring out a way to let people play private servers for that.

I agree with you, but there are people who enjoy moving over others’ sandcastles more than making their own. Some people enjoy ruining things for others. Others believe everyone else is cheating too, and their cheating is evening the playing field. The latter is a very common defense when asked directly.

Several content creators lose to cheaters and manage to interview the blatant cheaters who admit to it. There are also relatively popular YouTubers whose entire channels are accusing pro players and streamers of cheating in COD and games. Lots of people assume good players are all cheating, and that it’s approved (if not facilitated) by the developers. (Which is a necessary belief for them, considering these players will also often perform very well on LAN tournaments against other pros.)

I get annoyed just hearing a pre-recorded greeting at a drive thru. I can’t imagine ordering through an LLM, and yet I imagine I’ll have to deal with it sooner rather than later.

I initially uploaded it on March 30th, 2021. YouTube still shows that as the upload date for the video, and I’m stuck on my phone at the moment, so I’ll look to see if I can find a date for the claim updates later to sate my own curiosity, but that’s recent enough that I trust my memory of it being months, plural. I got an email about the claim that day, disputed it, got a copyright strike the next day, disputed THAT… And was eventually approved. I don’t have another email about that video saying it was approved or dropped or anything, until there was another claim (after apparently a manual review) on February 9th of 2023, resulting in a regional block.

So maybe it was because I disputed the actual strike and not just the initial claim?

Not that I’m complaining at you. I’m just surprised. I thought this was typical. Though I was annoyed at YouTube. I thought the video could’ve done a little better on YouTube than it did in Vimeo if I pointed people there instead, you know? (100-ish on YouTube now vs 30k on Vimeo those months earlier. But it was a timely video.)

But thanks for the insight. I appreciate it.

If you’re knowledgeable, I have a question. Years ago I uploaded a YouTube video that wouldn’t publish because of an automatic claim. I instantly disputed it, and it took like 5 or 6 months to resolve. But I saw someone today say that claimants had a week or two to respond to a dispute. Do you know if that’s the case now, or if someone was talking trash?

(I found a similar claim on YouTube, but they may’ve found the same line and repeated it, and who knows if FAQs are actually up to date.)

It’s funny, I remember watching The Scene from torrents (or maybe eDonkey2000/eMule?) 20 years ago. And it was relatively popular. Though I don’t remember the last time I even had a BitTorrent client installed. If you’re right, then we’ve failed ourselves. (And you may be right.)