Captain Aggravated

Remember when things could be good AND have pretty tits on them? Pinball machines, P-51Ds, coeds…

Never forget what made sites like Reddit popular in the first place.

you mean r/jailbait?

You know what. God dammit. He’s closer than a lot of people said to be lost to the Bermuda Triangle.

The Bermuda Triangle doesn’t really exist, so it’s boundaries are kind of fluid. When depicted on a map, it’s usually drawn from the speck on the map that is Bermuda 400 miles East of North Carolina, down to somewhere on the North Coast of Puerto Rico, then over to…somewhere on the Florida Foreskin, often Ft. Lauderdale or Miami.

Though I have seen the Bermuda Triangle drawn…however the fuck the author wants to. I’ve seen it drawn as a triangle centered on Bermuda with vertexes in Galveston, Natal and Cork, which is basically the entire mid-Atlantic.

The Carroll A. Deering, a 5 masted American schooner launched in 1919, was found run aground without her crew near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina in 1921. She was last seen with a crew on board as she passed the Cape Lookout light ship and actually spoke via bullhorn. So the entire mystery took place in Carolinian waters, ~400 miles from the nearest edge of the (typical) Triangle.

Meanwhile, if you use the typical Ft. Lauderdale - San Juan - St. George vertexes, Daytona Beach is about 220 miles outside the triangle. But if you’re willing to put the corner of the triangle at the Hooters on International Speedway Boulevard, you could legitimately say Dale Earnhardt died inside the Bermuda Triangle.

I want to take a bath now.

You’re not the first.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JpQk_G8p5Ps

Well here’s Dave Plummer, the retired Microsoft developer telling the story first hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXHu9OmLd8Y

It is my understanding that Microsoft BOB’s code was present in every copy of Windows XP.

I’m badly remembering this, something about the product key encryption needed a sizeable chunk of arbitrary data to function, and they had BOB laying around.

“very durable drinking glass”

What are the top three? English, English and Chinese?

eu-de-toilette, literally translates to toilet water.

It’s terrible that she couldn’t get the help she needed.

Yeah, funny thing about that: per the Wikipedia article on the case, there were no fewer than three attempts at inpatient care for her, one discharged her, one she refused and the third she checked herself out of.

I have a better question: at least some of those “driverless” cars are at least some of the time remote controlled by people in Southeast Asia or Pacifica. Do they have valid US driving licenses?

A slim majority, about 300 out of 535, figuring the date of creation of email at 1971.

For additional context, you know that infamous clip of Katie Couric being utterly baffled about how an email address works before asking her producer “Could you explain what ‘internet’ is?” That aired on January 24, 1994. Which, I can understand, the world wide web was switched on in August of 1991, not 3 years prior, so there wasn’t a lot of demand for internet connectivity among the masses yet. It was about the time for TV personalities to learn about email live on air.

That was 32 years ago, when email was already 23 years old.

Alternate Reality Game. It’s a game or puzzle hidden in the “real” world or the rest of the open internet, often framed as a real-world mystery. Many but not all have their “trail heads” or first clues hidden in a video game. They’re often used for marketing or promotional purposes, or to reward fans wtih some extra fun gameplay.

The one I’m most familiar with was the one Valve did to tease the release of Portal 2. One day they pushed an update to Portal whose patch notes included a bizarre line about FCC frequency compliance. Jump in game, and…if you’ve played the game, you know the radio playing the Muzak version of Still Alive at the beginning? Well there’s one of those in every test chamber now, and they’ve all got a glowing red light on them. If you pick it up and carry it around, you might find somewhere in the room where the light turns green and it starts making a strange sound. Sometimes it’s morse code, sometimes it’s a weird warbling sound, which turns out to be slow-scan television. Put these images together, and it pointed to a phone number, which if you called responded with modem tones. Players realized that it was an old school bulletin board system, which contained weird fluff text and ASCII renditions of concept art.

soon

Mother distraught at 9 year old son buys $432,000 on Playstation Store with credit card taken from purse.

I’m either a 1 or a 5. “Eh, what are you going to do?”

Likely for ToU rates, I could imagine looking out for weather updates, if there’s a likely power outage I could see it heating the water another 5 or 10 degrees so it’ll last longer/provide “more” hot water?

le sigh. I’d like to have a home with systems that do things like…synchronize to a clock more accurate and reliable than one I can feasibly own myself, that others such as the utility companies are using. I’d like to be able to get weather alerts and have the refrigerator automatically get a degree colder the water heater get five or ten degrees hotter, run the HVAC a bit, charge batteries, etc.

What I don’t want are a thousand little ARM computers each one a member of three different botnets trying to scrape my home network, sending audio, video, FLIR and radar telemetry straight to Kim Jong Fuck’s third testicle from the left, while also DDOSing Amnesty International and waiting for the cpu.detonate() command to come down so it’s time to buy another fucking desk lamp.

This isn’t a shitpost, it’s valid satire.

Here’s the popular story as I’ve heard it:

The North American video game industry crash of 1983 was Nintendo’s chance to enter the North American market in earnest. A tidal wave of low quality, sometimes non-functional third party shovelware for consoles like the Atari 2600 had basically killed public faith in the industry, and folks were ready to write off video games as a passing fad. Inserting yourself into a dying industry like that takes some care, so Nintendo did some market research and found that Americans:

• wanted to hear nothing about video games, but were excited for AV equipment and high tech toys. CD players and VCRs were increasingly popular, and electronic toys like the Speak 'N Spell and Teddy Ruxpin were rapidly gaining popularity.

• Didn’t really play games as a family, games were kind of considered toys for the youth, with very few Americans over the age of 45 claiming to enjoy playing video games.

• liked large things. American homes are fairly large by global standards, and especially in the still mostly analog world of the 1980s bigger usually meant better. A VHS cassette held more tape, and thus played longer, than the smaller Betamax cassette.

• Expressed frustration in finding good quality games through all the nonsense. Some games wouldn’t even run, and in the 1980s, how could you tell?

Responding to this input, they changed the name of the console. Gone was “Family Computer” or “Famicom”, in with Nintendo Entertainment System. The form factor was drastically changed, removing the conventional top loading edge connector slot in favor of that front loading then push down mechanism designed to emulate a VHS deck. The cartridge shell was made at least 4 times larger than a Famicom cartridge, though the circuit board inside was often identical in size and shape to a Famicom cart; most NES cartridges were mostly empty in size, but that size was required by the loading mechanism. Mostly as a marketing stunt, they offered a bundle early on with a robot toy called ROB that could interact with a few specially designed games. It was a gimmick, but a successful one.

And finally, DRM. To address the shovelware problem, Hiroshi Yamauchi, President of Nintendo, would personally approve every game published for the system. The console had a hardware lockout chip that would look for a corresponding key chip in the console; if none was found, it would reset the console, meaning unapproved software couldn’t run. That, along with enforcing IP laws on the cartridge’s physical design, was designed to make Nintendo the only publisher for the system; any third party developers would have to contract with Nintendo to manufacture the cartridges. Nintendo communicated this to customers via the Nintendo Seal Of Quality, a (trademarked) badge on the packaging to reassure customers that the game had gone through a vetting process. They stopped short of guaranteeing the game was fun to play, but that it functioned correctly, wouldn’t crash or damage the console, and contained relatively wholesome content. Custer’s Revenge would never wear a Nintendo Seal Of Quality.

That weird relationship with physical media started off as a key element of their business model, back in the NES era. They just…never let go.

It’s our special this evening.