dual_sport_dork
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
- Comment on It's called seeing through a glass darkly. 2 days ago:
If only that boat could be made smaller somehow and fit inside the car.
- Comment on Stop this tomfoolery at once 4 days ago:
Ach, crivens. First it’s tha’ hands on the hips. Then it’s tha’ pursin’ o’ the lips. Then the tapping o’ tha’ feets. Waily, waily, waily…
- Comment on No looky for you! 5 days ago:
Negative. Being struck with water pressure is what opens the detergent door. That’s why it’s sprung like a mousetrap and so easy to jostle open accidentally. You can take the door and dispenser apart if you like and you will find no electronics in there. Also, if you look carefully at the upper wash arm you’ll see it has one nozzle on the tip that points outwards, not up. That’s the one that makes the stream designed to hit and open the detergent door.
Of course, the dishwasher’s program determines when to blast it at full pressure to pop it open. So it is “timed” in that sense.
- Comment on WTF is a rural town in the USA? 6 days ago:
Another possibly related wrinkle here is that I an given to understand (I am by no means an expert) that there is not a single square inch of dirt anywhere within the United States that is not considered by the Postal Service to fall within the boundaries of a ZIP code. Regardless of the population level of that location (even if any), any mailbox staked into the ground anywhere will have an associated ZIP code which will inherit the name of some city/town/borough/whatever by default. This is regardless of how many miles are between that location and the city in question, or how much it makes sense.
Everywhere in the country is somewhere, even if it’s the middle of nowhere, according to the post office.
For added giggles, here is one of my oft-reposted pictures, which happens to be more-or-less in the, er, “city center” of Tartown, PA which is on the MABDR route in the saddle of a random mountain in the middle of the woods near the Southern border of Pennsylvania.
Tartown is an abandoned “unincorporated community” within the ZIP code 17320, which ostensibly covers Fairfield in Adams County, PA. “Community” is a strong word. There is in fact no such place as Tartown, except there is. Information on it is sparse, and it contains no development, no remaining buildings, no utilities, no government, and no population. However it is a named point on a map that has a defined location and presumably will forevermore, as long as the records are kept. Thus it is a town.
…For a suitably small quantity of “town.”
- Comment on FFFFFUUUUUUUU 6 days ago:
I still use the “y u no [whatever]” guy pretty frequently. That one has some legs.
- Comment on WTF is a rural town in the USA? 1 week ago:
People will start calling their settlement a “village” here when they’ve decided to start being pretentious about it. Expect to find a winery there, or a studio where someone with frizzy hair makes inscrutable physical art, or a bunch of horse enthusiasts.
- Comment on WTF is a rural town in the USA? 1 week ago:
Yes, it’s an example of the “everyone fled” variety. Well, almost everyone.
- Comment on WTF is a rural town in the USA? 1 week ago:
One Dollar General. If you have a Family Dollar as well you are in the big city.
If you have a Dollar Tree also, you may in fact be in the 'hood.
- Comment on WTF is a rural town in the USA? 1 week ago:
There are named towns in the US with populations in the single digits. This can be due to either the population moving away, fleeing, or simply dying off over time – Centralia, PA leaps to mind – or because it’s just a cluster of a couple of houses at a crossroads that would otherwise be in the middle of nowhere. There may not necessarily be a post office or any other services there.
In fact, there are “towns” in the US in that they are named on the map and have a defined location filed with the state/county/Postal Service, but they have no inhabitants at all. In many cases this is because a planned development never actually happened.
- Comment on New Supermaterial: As Strong As Steel And As Light As Styrofoam 1 week ago:
I take umbrage at all these popsci articles that keep breathlessly insisting that the new wondermaterial is as “strong” as steel without meaningfully specifying how. Because inevitably it only matches just one mechanical property of steel, if it even manages that (so also look out for weasel words like "nearly as strong as steel).
As strong in terms of tensile strength? Shear strength? Hardness? Elastic modulus? Abrasion resistance?
In this case it’s compressive strength. No other properties are mentioned except weight. That’s not terribly impressive from a mechanical engineering standpoint. From a chemistry standpoint, sure. But steel – even then, there are oodles of potential steel alloys – has a rough compressive strength ranging from 500-ish to a maximum of about 1500 MPa. Big whoop. Most ceramics meet or handily exceed that, and quite a lot of them are significantly lighter than steel. So why don’t we build airplanes out of those? Because their other properties are completely unsuitable for the task, especially for large pieces. In particular they’re much too brittle.
You want to know what else has a compressive (and tensile!) strength of around 500 MPa? Aluminum. Guess what we build airplanes out of.
- Comment on Cyberpunk 2 is now in preproduction, CD Projekt says 1 week ago:
I’ve held multiple times before that it possibly would have been better off if it were a more focused, linear experience possibly akin to how the newer Deus Ex games worked. Within those you had the freedom to screw around in the area/mission you were in and given a wide latitude to complete things as you saw fit, but it definitely excised the wannabe GTA filler in the middle.
2077 had an excellent series of incredibly well-directed moments, both within the main story missions as well as several notable side missions, but the stuff in between made little sense especially given the story framework of V living on borrowed time with a ticking bomb in their head. But sure, let’s save up and buy nine apartments, collect all the gold class weapons, stock your garage with all the cars, traipse all over down finding all of Delamain’s rogue taxis, do a sidequest for this random chump, see a concert, check all these cyberpsychos off our list…
There is incredible detail in the world if – but only if – you stop to search for it. There are a lot of things most players will probably miss unless they’re specifically pointed out, and while that’s certainly neat it also means that the lack of discoverability means the time spent on many of those details ultimately turns out to be wasted. 2077 is thus a weird hybrid of a linear and open world game and as a result feels both too constrained and to unfocused at the same time. It’s all to easy to get derailed, and alas to some extent you have to let yourself get derailed to accrue enough XP and equipment so you don’t get your ass handed to you if you just try to stick to the main storyline, even though that storyline is written as if it’s supposed to be a single linear narrative.
Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed the game. I just would have presented it much differently if I were in charge.
- Comment on No looky for you! 1 week ago:
Specifically in your face because one of the nozzles on the middle spray arm is aimed outwards to hit the latch on the detergent dispenser door.
- Comment on No looky for you! 1 week ago:
INB4 KDTM804ESS.
I have to conjecture this didn’t sell very well.
- Comment on T-Mobile secretly records iPhone screens and claims it's being helpful. 1 week ago:
This is so. At the bottom of the article it says:
To help us give customers who use T-Life a smoother experience, we are rolling out a new tool in the app that will help us quickly troubleshoot reported or detected issues. This tool records activities within the app only and does not see or access any personal information. If a customer’s T-Life app currently supports the new functionality, it can be turned off in the settings under preferences.
So yes, it can only see itself, i.e. within the T-Mobile app. It’s still dumb.
I’m not well versed enough in Android app development to answer whether or not one userspace app can even access the screen contents of another app without root or special permissions, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are several roadblocks in that path on the part of the OS for obvious reasons.
- Comment on What games are just objective master pieces? 1 week ago:
…Just don’t look at it too hard when you go to the Great Deku Tree in BotW.
- Comment on What games are just objective master pieces? 1 week ago:
I thought at first you guys were thinking of this, and I was puzzled. Then I looked it up.
Crivens, it’s like a combination of Tempest and Flappy Bird, but since it’s a Terry Cavanagh game it’s also been whacked over the head soundly with VVVVVV.
- Comment on What games are just objective master pieces? 1 week ago:
I also maintain that Breath of the Wild was superior to Tears of the Kingdom. Apparently this opinion makes Zelda fans incredibly salty.
- Comment on What games are just objective master pieces? 1 week ago:
Journey is indeed absolutely fantastic. It finally got a PC port a while ago after languishing on the PS3 for quite some years, and its hardware requirements are probably low enough in the modern era that practically anybody should be able to experience it.
My only gripe is that online randos seem not to understand the meditation achievement, and get antsy when you try to entice them to sit there with you until the achievement pops. And since you can’t type at them you can’t communicate to them what’s going on.
I got the trophy on PS3 back in the day but I haven’t successfully wrangled anybody into helping me get the Steam achievement for that yet…
- Comment on What games are just objective master pieces? 1 week ago:
Historically a masterpiece has been a (or the) work that demonstrates an artist is capable of utilizing their medium to its fullest extent, i.e. it has been mastered. Per ye olde Wiki:
Historically, a “masterpiece” was a work of a very high standard produced by an apprentice to obtain full membership, as a “master”, of a guild or academy in various areas of the visual arts and crafts.
In that light, I’d say the best qualified would be games that completely utilized the capabilities of the platform they were designed for or, perhaps of interest to more people, expanded what everyone thought could be done with those systems. Games which were furthermore well polished and complete, and did not have much room for improvement taking into account the constraints they had to work with at the time. (For instance: No duh we could make Mario 64 run at a higher framerate and have better textures to look nicer on hardware now. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t arguably a masterpiece of its time, on the system it was on.) This doesn’t just have to be technical stuff – It could be the way the game used storytelling, its gameplay mechanics, or anything else.
- Comment on DOOM: The Dark Ages Has Reportedly Sold Less Than 1 Million Copies 1 week ago:
Bethesda ought to just let the Doom IP go and give it to someone who actually cares.
I will never give a single red cent to Bethesda ever again and I sure as hell ain’t doing it for this. Whatever this is has no business claiming to be a Doom game. They probably would have had slightly better luck if they slapped the veneer of some other IP over it rather than Doom.
- Comment on Valve CEO Gabe Newell’s Neuralink competitor is expecting its first brain chip this year 1 week ago:
- Comment on A 19-year old cis lesbian woman was beaten unconscious and robbed after she tried to use the women's restroom at a McDonald's in Carpentersville, Illinois 1 week ago:
Fitspacks are always a bad idea. If you want something legal to carry, start keeping your keys on a locking carbiner rated for rock climbing. If it has a kilonewton (kN) rating stamped in it, it is suitable. This won’t collapse on your hand and no amount of force any human is capable of generating will break it, but anyone whose nose you drive it into at maximum effort is likely to remember the experience. This should also be legal to carry anywhere.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Well, there are seven other known sub-planetary bodies (dwarf planets) in the solar system that also have moons: Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong, Quaoar, Orcus, and Salacia. Eris in particular is larger than Pluto. So then Eris would have to be promoted to being a planet, too. Along with the other six, plus any more we might discover later. At the time of its discovery I don’t think anyone had yet observed that Pluto has a moon, and it wasn’t discovered until even later that Pluto actually has five moons.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
I wouldn’t put it past an awful lot of people given the stupidity I see on a daily basis.
Pluto is a strange relic that basically got considered a planet only due to the time and method by which it was observed. But it turns out that there are a lot of things in the solar system that are about the size of Pluto or even larger which would require us to either declare there are dozens and dozens of planets or, the slightly more sane avenue, come up with a slightly more specific definition of what a planet actually is which by necessity excludes Pluto.
All the hype about is basically just down to people refusing to change what they learned in elementary school. But the thing about science is that it changes and is refined over time as we gain understanding of the universe and how things work. This is what makes science science. Anything less is simply dogma.
- Comment on You Can 3D Print These Assistive Typing Tools 1 week ago:
Cripes. Does that mean we’re bringing back the “3D Scan Of My Friend’s Ass” phenomenon?
- Comment on New Cars Don't All Come With Dipsticks Anymore, Here's Why 1 week ago:
Can confirm; I used to manage a hardware store with an attached small engine repair shop. There’s a reason Briggs and Stratton abbreviates so readily to “BS.”
They’ve been trying to do the absolute bare minimum possible to maximize profits and making their machines flimsy and deliberately uneconomical to repair for several decades, now. All I can say is that we ought to be thankful for aftermarket parts.
- Comment on New Cars Don't All Come With Dipsticks Anymore, Here's Why 1 week ago:
I think we can all safely assume that EV’s are not relevant to this discussion.
- Comment on The PS3's comeback was insane 1 week ago:
It was the same story with DVD and the PS2, which was in no small part a major reason for its early success.
Sony also sold the PS3 itself at a loss at launch in order to get a bigger install base, and hoped to make their money back on software sales.
- Comment on The PS3's comeback was insane 1 week ago:
I’m pretty sure the Wii won that battle. 101-some-odd million units of that were sold, 87ish for the PS3 and 84ish for the 360. The PS2 still blows everything else out of the water, still being the best selling console of all time at 160 million or so.
People had a big time hate-on for the PS3 in its initial years. At launch the PS3 was the most expensive of the current gen options and Sony didn’t have much of anything very compelling to run on it. The mantra at the time was “going Wii60,” i.e. getting an Xbox 360 for all the big name AAA titles and a Wii for all the niche Nintendo stuff and pointedly ignoring the PS3 entirely, because the notion was you could buy a base 360 and a Wii for about the same as the cost of a PS3. All that took a few years to get turned around.
- Comment on Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews. 1 week ago:
?
You can just right click on it and hit “remove from toolbar.” That’s all it takes.
Putting it back in my toolbar for the purposes of taking this screenshot was actually more clicks.
You can actually do this with most, but not all, of the toolbar items. You can even 86 the refresh button that way if you’re feeling truly perverse.
