Jedi425

A good way to learn more about ol' Rooshy without giving him traffic would be to catch this podcast by the F-Plus. It's as insane as you'd imagine.

This is a really interesting thought, that I'm going to contribute a story to because it's directly relevant. I might never have married my wife, you see, if I hadn't had access to the white pages. So I met the woman who would become my wife at her senior prom (I was a year behind her at another school, I'd been invited as a friend of another girl, who rightly told me I 'needed to get out of the house' - Heather, if you're out there, thanks again), there was drama with my future wife's date (another woman), things happened, we had a great time and I wanted to ask her out again, but I'd made a mistake - I never asked her for her phone number. Being at a different school, it was difficult to get hold of her number; my only contact at her school was my friend, and she was tied up with her own stuff, also hard to get hold of. So, I did the desperate, oblivious thing. I grabbed a copy of the white pages, and I looked up her last name, figuring her parents were probably listed. There were, fortunately, only two listings under her name. I called them both. I didn't know it at the time, but one of them was her uncle (who was very confused), but the other was her home. I managed to get her on the phone, we laughed, I took her to a terrible party (which she miraculously didn't hold against me), and we've been together (and then married) over a decade. At no point during this whole thing did I even consider how it'd come off for me to just call her up like that, without having gotten her number. Nowadays, would I have even considered doing that? And if I had, would I have been (probably rightly) treated with much greater suspicion?

So, who else is learning new, terrible things from the internet thanks to all this mess? For me, this video (which is a good watch for anyone like me who's still trying to make sense of this whole thing) taught me that 'sea lioning' is an actual thing that actual jerks do when arguing in bad faith. And suddenly the comic with the sea lions makes a new kind of sense. I'm not sure if I'm happier with this knowledge, or anything else in that video. Nope, not at all. Between this and reactivating my Twitter account, I'm not happy with any of the things I've done, learned, or heard thanks to GG.

I can really empathize with the airport story; my father worked for an airline, and the world of airlines and flights is a realm of madness, where standby doesn't even actually mean standby, depending on who asks, and when, and how much they paid. So there's grades of standby, arranged in a sort of hierarchy the same way Angels are. As I recall, it goes something like: Bumped Passengers (this is where Danielle probably ended up when she got a seat) Paid Standby (rare, since most of the time you can spend another 25-50 bucks and just get a real seat) Airline Employees On Serious Airline Business (like flight crews relocating for a route they are assigned to, or executives flying to 'meetings') Luggage / Checked Carrion Airline Employees Flying Free (fun fact: this is called 'negative space'; as in, money is not flowing out of these seats) Since we flew 'negative space' a lot, I spent a lot of time as a kid sleeping in airports. It wasn't terrible; you learned how to sleep in all sorts of places, you got good at reading maps and signs, and you gained a new appreciation for having a newspaper to read, since at the time the only portable gaming system was the original GameBoy, which you could only play for so long before even that obnoxiously heavy power pack died. But yeah, even when you worked FOR the airline, you were subject to the whims of Bureaucron, Master of Paperwork.

I feel like this whole thing has really solidified my lack of understanding of the value of Twitter, though that probably has a lot to do with the fact that I've made something like 8 tweets in 6 years. A small group of people can just say #TerribleThing over and over and suddenly we have to pay attention to them? How do you solve the problem of this sort of thing driving good people insane without telling the targets to just never use Twitter? Make every Twitter account a verified account? Enforce stricter controls on account creation? The same ease of anonymity and communication that make it useful for legitimate protests in places like Hong Kong make it equally useful to groups like #GoobleGrape, and I don't think we can fix this without removing a lot of Twitter's usefulness for good. (And ugh, every time I see a hashtag I assume it's an IRC channel. Why couldn't they use ampersands or something?)

Anyone who's been following the whole #GoobleGrape thing or whatever would be well served to listen to the last few episodes of Isometric. I know they've been mentioned here before, but the most recent episodes (in particular today's, episode 24) have some real talk from Brianna Wu, Who Is Apparently Destroying Video Games Or Something. It's far from fun to listen to, though, so if you're already feeling down, maybe don't listen to the first 40 minutes or so (I think they straight up tell you to skip it at the beginning of the cast, actually).

There was a pilot written for a post-disaster Federation as part of a new series, which never saw the light of day except in storyboards. It was called Star Trek: Final Frontier, and it had some interesting bits in there, like a captain trying to recapture the Federation's spirit of exploration in the face of rampant paranoia. It looks like they ran with the concept a bit more, but since it's got no funding behind it, who knows if it'll ever get past this?

I may never have it. On another note, it blows my mind that this shit has gotten so insane that even the damn Raspberry Pi people have to weigh in. It's nice that this is getting wider coverage, but it's also really validating my personal mission to never, ever use Twitter.

For a kid who loved sci-fi, getting to ride Star Tours was just about the most amazing thing. I haven't been to a Disney since the prequels came out, though, so I'm scared they may have changed it.

A good 64-bit client might be the thing that drives me off Firefox and on to Chrome. But the font thing would drive me nuts too.

Adblock Plus can be a little bit of a hog on Firefox, yeah, but I run with plenty of RAM, so it doesn't bug me unless I'm on a prolonged session.

This has been around for a bit, but a search in here for 'Nintendo' didn't seem to show any posts. If, like me, hearing about Wii U games on the podcast got you interested in games like 3D World, then do this: -Go here: https://store.nintendo.com/ng3/ -Pay $200 USD for a Wii U Deluxe + Nintendoland bundle. (They also have Wii Remote Plus/Nunchuck combos for $25. Pick up one of these at least if you want to play Wii games and don't already have one, since the Bundle doesn't come with any. Hell, even if you have a Wii or Wii U already, $25 for a remote+nunchuck is a heckuva deal.) These consoles are eligible for the Digital Deluxe Promotion, by the by: https://p.nintendo.net/index.html -Enjoy your system. It'll come marked 'refurbished', but a lot of buyers (myself included) have gotten the 'new unit' surveys on their Club Nintendo accounts, so many people suspect these may be retail units that got shipped back for... reasons. They also sell refurb 3DS XLs and 2DSes there, if you're looking for a handheld deal.

So, do games like the later Journeyman Project games count in this context, or no? (I'm pretty sure the first one doesn't, since it was all static images and maybe a bit of CGI in a corner of the big-ol' UI.) Basically, I'm just looking for an excuse to remind people that the Journeyman Project existed and was great.

It probably is, in the sense that AFAIK there is nowhere near the volume of malware out there for iOS and Android that there is for PC, so any ad banners that have bad content are probably going to be aimed at the PC. iOS in particular does a lot of work to partition off each app from each other app, so long as you don't jailbreak, so you're 'safer', but only until bad guys start really working on iOS, at which point it's only a matter of time. There's malware for it out there, but the same tight controls on App Store content that a lot of people hate (because of the limitations it puts on their device) also help prevent malware from getting to a non-JB'd phone or iPad. That being said, take care with your tablet as well. If you jailbreak (nothing wrong if you do, just be aware of the risks), be very careful what you install off non-Apple/Google stores like Cydia. If you're on Android, disable the installation of unsigned APKs unless you know you need to do so and got the APK from a trusted source. Keep features like Find My iPhone/iPad on at all times. Back up frequently, all that jazz. You could also use tools like AdBlock and NoScript to stop banner ads on your PC browser. If the ad doesn't load, it's not going to hurt you.

Anyplace where we can discuss the real serious issues, like why skeletons fart the way they do, is OK by me. Seriouspost, I took a break from the podcast back at like #130 or so and only just now came back. Everything's different. New song, new hosts, random tangents about the Blade UI on the Xbox 360... well, OK, it's not that different. I owe the podcast crew big time for getting me interested in the 3DS again a while back, because Mario 3D Land is a great game and I've enjoyed every minute.