THIS NEW SITE INFORMATION REPOSITORY OF ENLIGHTMENT OF NEW AGE HUMAN POTENTIAL WAVE OF ENERGY CRYSTAL WOO HAS MADE ME UNCOVER MY TRUE POTENTIAL



What news sites do you immediately file under "crackpot" when you come across them? Alternet, Natural News, Infowars, Breitbart all come to mind.


me irl b4 being unleashed, now im WOKE AF

SPEAKING of InfoWars, I'm still disgusted at them for going to the news conference after the Boston marathon bombing, and flat-out, unironically asking the governor if this was a false flag attack in an effort to reduce our civil liberties. The governor had to literally take that question seriously and answer it. Granted, he swatted it down with a simple "No" and moved on, but it's the principle.

The internet has brought all the crazies together in a support group for crazies, and now literally every disaster is treated as a government conspiracy to reduce our civil liberties. A father of one of the victims of the Sandyhook shooting was harassed by someone who continually told him that he was just an actor, and he didn't really have a son that died. Can you imagine how awful? Maybe it's time we pulled the plug on this whole internet thing. Sorry TC, you'll have to be sacrificed. :(

In closing, Fuck Alex Jones. Here's a video compilation of him crying.



And a couple of gifs if you're too lazy to click.

Obviously.

Never change, Hammer Studios.

News articles online are getting more crowded than ever. You've got ads running down both side margins ("THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK SHOWS IF YOU HAVE TOENAIL FUNGUS" is a weirdly common one), ads between paragraph of content, then usually some kind of banner that grays out the whole page and tries to get you to sign up for some mailing list. Does that actually work? Has anyone in the history of internet browsing EVER actually put their e-mail address in one of those goddamn things?

Anyway, the trend continued to get annoying when videos were inserted into the page, usually at the top of the article. That's well and good, I won't begrudge a person if they'd rather watch the story instead of read it. But then, the bastards started auto-playing. Cut that out! I'm impatient, and reading is much quicker than watching, not to mention that it's easier to skip over the fluff.

But now... NOW... as soon as you scroll past the video, it shrinks and drops down to the side of the page. "Hang on a second there, Beanjo!" it says. "You must not have seen, there's a VIDEO up in this mother fucker. Here, I'll just leave it right here for you so you can correct this glaring oversight." Then it autoplays a car commercial. Stop it!

It's with a CH, right? I think it is.

Can we get embedded tweets up in here? I tried to add the BB Custom Code for it, but I don't have admin privileges. :(

I've seen this making the rounds, and the discussion tends to boil down to a statement that if someone says something deplorable enough, or is in enough of a position of power, it's okay to physically assault them. Alternatively, I have no right to condemn such an action because I'm not in the maligned group.

I get the sentiment, I really do. Part of me even agrees with it. However, another part of me doesn't think this is a good standard. Where's the cutoff point? How deplorable does a view have to be? How much confidence do you need to have that the person actually said something deplorable and isn't just a social idiot? How do you know you aren't going to kill the person by mistake? Would THAT be acceptable? Would shooting that guy be acceptable? Would kidnapping him and torturing him be acceptable? (A recent news story suggests at least a few people though it would be okay to kidnap and torture a Trump supporter.) Lastly, is that really the world we even want to live in? Yes, his views are unacceptable, but what if someone's unacceptable view is actually correct, but most people don't know it yet?

When these people start rounding up minorities, then "by any means necessary" can be on the table for consideration. For now, well, I don't want my face at risk because I said something some redneck thought was deplorable, so I can't condone it here. I'm frankly surprised just how quickly casual violence became acceptable to progressives.



Remember when our side would NEVER do anything like that, and such a violent response was just a sign of how backwards and violent Trump supporters were?

So Konami is finally using their Bomberman franchise...

http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/10/1457182...rman-anime



On the one hand, it's a nearly all-female cast.

On the other hand...



This isn't what we meant.

First of all, look at cartoony Bomberman male among a bunch of more realistically proportioned females. This is a trope I see a bit too often. Here's a female bomberman done right.

http://bomberman.wikia.com/wiki/Pretty_Bomber



Now, is that super progressive? Well, it certainly is playing up to "girly" stereotypes, what with the skirt and the hearts and the pink and all, but compared to what Konami is doing, it's downright progressive because she's otherwise treated just like the rest of the cast, drawn in the same style and everything. Besides, having a "girly girly" type character isn't bad so long as it's not what they do every single time (spoiler: in Japan, it is). There's room for the message that "girly" doesn't mean "worse than manly".

Just to really drive the point home, these character all get their clothing blown off of them as the battle goes on. Yay for violently forced exposure!

Go to hell Konami! Maybe that one where you get frozen in ice. This is exactly why I'm sick of the anime and gaming industries in Japan right now. This stuff right here!

So yeah, I've been away from here for a bit, and it's mostly because at long last I decided to get a new computer. The rate of how often you need a new machine has declined precipitously versus the '90s, as the fact that I had my last machine (the Vista computer) for a full decade (with some upgrades, but the same CPU and motherboard) and it's still pretty decent for a lot of things, but you eventually do need to upgrade still, and I've finally started on that process. After thinking about it, for the first time I chose to build it myself, instead of buying a prebuilt one. Everything I got worked fine once I got it set up -- I'm on it now, finally -- I had some issues making choices, as usual, so I didn't actually have a fully functioning main computer again until yesterday (it now is). Sure, I've got a tablet, and did use my old WinME machine some for the internet, but that machine's ... a bit dated... so it's not the kind of thing you want to be on for long...

But anyway, what did I get? Well, I chose to get a mostly new machine, but re-used my old video card, hard drives, and power supply; I will get a new video card and large storage hard drive eventually, and probably also a power supply, but I'll put that off some, this was expensive enough for now at the moment. So, I got a case (Thermaltake Core V51 Riing Edition -- it's green and black), motherboard (Asus Prime Z270-A), CPU (the new Intel 7700K), CPU cooler (a Noctua), SSD drive (M.2 style, since the motherboard supports it), and a BD/DVD/CD drive, but I'm using that new high-end CPU with my old GeForce 560 card for now. Heh. On the subject of that case, it was a bit pricey since they're getting hard to find since Thermaltake seems to have discontinued this green version of the case in favor of just a black-and-grey one, but of all the green and black cases I was looking at online, this looked like the best one on both features and looks, so I got it. It's a pretty big case, a good bit larger than my old computer cases despite still claiming to be a "mid-tower", but it's good. I particularly like how quiet it is; not only is it dramatically quieter than my very loud previous machine, I think it's even quieter than my WinME machine, which is impressive considering it has lots more fans in it! Bigger fans really are quieter, that's for sure. That's pretty nice; it's almost quiet enough to forget it's on, which again, is a huge huge change from the Vista computer's case. Good stuff.

The case is mostly good, but even so it is disappointing that no modern cases are all-green, like my dated and somewhat flawed, but awesome-looking, old case is! This case is nice, but what I really want is an all-green case, not this one that's as much or more black than it is green. Why is black back in as a computer case color, didn't we just get over that? I think of black computer cases as being the style of the '00s, but I guess it's back... and it could be worse, black cases are better looking than the old beige ones, but still. Colors are nice, and not only for people who want tiny little cases but also for those of us who want full-sized ones. Oh well.

Anyway, for an OS, I got Windows 10 (and installed the 64-bit version of course). From what little I've seen of it so far I'm not exactly a fan, but as a gamer what other choice do you have? It's not like many games support Linux, even now, and buying an old version of Windows is going to lead to compatibility problems for sure. On that note I did try installing Vista on this machine from my old copy that came with my last computer, to see what would happen, but unfortunately the motherboard doesn't have Vista drivers, so there's no ethernet and VERY flaky USB support, among other issues. Too bad, a Vista machine this powerful would me amusing. I'll need some way of running software that doesn't support a 64-bit OS, which I'm sure I have a lot of -- 16-bit Win3.1 games, all those '90s and early '00s games with their 16-bit installers, etc. Would something like VMWare work? I've never had a computer that supported it before. This is an issue I will need to figure out a solution to.

Otherwise, Windows 10 seems functional and fast, though I don't like this "flat" trend in OS graphical design. You know, everything is lines and boxes and boring fonts, with no detail. I've seen it before, since my tablet runs Windows 8, and it's the same here but on a regular computer... and yes, it's still pretty ugly, like always. I'm sure I'd be more used to this if I'd gone along with the changes in Windows over the years, but going from ten years on Vista to this, it's a huge change and I don't like it. The more curved design of Vista, the transparencies, and such, I like that look and always have. I will admit that it has some style, but in my opinion this whole "flat" aesthetic is a real downgrade from what we had before. I know that I'm not exactly one to change things I'm used to, but still... ... well, at least Seamonkey's "Modern" theme, with its style straight out of early '00s Netscape, still works, so that's good! :)

Besides that, in terms of how it works, well, I haven't used it much, but even just in Windows, the significant speed improvement is noticeable. I don't know if it's that websites or applications get more demanding over time or what, but web browsers, Flash, etc. all worked pretty badly on that machine, and I had to use Flash videos everywhere because HTML5 video was even worse, single-digit-framerate stuff most of the time. Another really annoying problem that I did not used to have on the Vista machine was that at some point in the least few years, when a Flash video/window was made fullscreen and then I click on the other monitor (since I have two, remember), to do something else on another web browser window while watching it... the browser would lock up, requiring me to open the task manager, close Flash, and reload the webpage. Then finally the video would allow me to click on the other window during the video. Weird bug, yes, and I don't know why it started but it was annoying... but with HTML5's awful framerates it was not an alternative. Needless to say, on this new computer I have none of those issues. That's awesome. And even with the same video card, since I was definitely quite CPU-limited in games before, I'm sure I'll notice huge improvements.

On that note, one other question I've been wondering about is, is the onboard Intel graphics chip in the 7700K better, or is my 5+-year-old GeForce 560? I've assumed that the 560 is the better choice, so it's in this computer now, but I don't know for sure.

Finally though... I'd not only been using my last computer for ten years, I've never re-installed the OS or anything. Maybe that was causing some of my problems such as the Flash issues I describe above, but I didn't want to have to start over with installing games, applications, etc, and the computer never messed up badly enough to need a re-install, so I never did it. Going from that sometimes annoying but familiar OS to a new one that has some similarities but a lot of differences, and with nothing installed beyond the basics, is not great... I don't like the idea of having to re-install everything just to get the OS to see that it exists, particularly when a lot of those games aren't going to be able to install anyway I'm sure (16-bit installers!). Steam, impressively, once installed seems to be able to just import over the folders with no re-installs needed, and that's great but for everything else, for both games and apps, this will take a while.

... And on that note, can anything be done to make this new Start menu not totally awful? It looks like the new Win10 Start menu and taskbar have very limited customization as well, unlike before -- I don't see a way to add a second row to the taskbar for a row of quick-launch icons like I had on Vista (useful thing!), the Sidebar is gone (having stuff like a clock and system monitor visible there was kind of nice, instead of only on the taskbar), and in the Start Menu... wow, this is bad. I mean, the Win8 Start screen, with its row of boxes for Windows Store apps and then atrocious unsortable list of applications, was a disaster, but I was hoping that 10 actually made things better since it supposedly brought back the Start Menu. Well... nope. That's not good. I want a real start menu with folders, not this atrocious abomination! I sort things by CATEGORY, not alphabetical order. The idea of having all of your things in one terrible alphabetically-sorted list is pretty much unusably bad. You can make folders, but what's all this stuff doing on that list by default that I don't see in the Start Menu folders? That's annoying, unless there's a third Start Menu folder somewhere in addition to the two that return from before... And for a desktop, the upper right two thirds of the Start menu's kind of useless, since that's mostly for Windows Store apps and not regular Windows programs, and most things you use are not going to be Store apps, unless you're playing some of those games MS is only selling there in order to force people to use their stupid store of course. You can pin some things to the bottom right part of the Start menu, which is something, but why are the icons along the left edge apparently reserved only for Windows folders and their stupid recommended folder setup (your personal Video, Music, etc. folders) that I have never used and don't think I'll start using now? That's pretty obnoxious.

Seriously,Vista had a near-perfect Start menu. They should NOT have messed with a great thing, not for a desktop OS. I know 8 did it first, but it's not fixed and is still awful! Have the fullscreen Win8 thing available for tablets, sure, but for a desktop this is still pretty bad.

I recall playing the original Doom and getting bored with it. I just wasn't very good at it, frankly, and gave up and cheated my way through both 1 and 2 (which are, basically, the same game). I've gone back to those games after being very surprised by Doom 4 and can report my opinion on it has entirely reversed. Firstly, I reconfigured the controls into something more modern and actually used a mouse to aim this time. Between my experience and the better controls, I've gone from barely surviving the lowest difficulty to generally trivializing Ultra-Violence (I still don't think I'm ready for Nightmare). When I'm not running through walls as an invincible god, I find I can actually appreciate the level design.

That's the crux of all this. I can now appreciate Doom (1 and 2) for it's level design, and it's that level design that kept me from getting bored through roughly 70 levels. A large part of this comes from treating the enemies as building blocks to make unique encounters across the whole game. When I move around an arena the way the designers intended me to (that is, without sucking), I can see how each one is intended to flow, and how to balance the threats and manage the large crowds. I also can appreciate Doom 4 for capturing this design so well. In spite of what others have complained about with Doom 4, it also became clear to me that Doom has ALWAYS had platforming elements, but they work pretty well. There's no jumping, but there is "vaulting" across gaps and working across very narrow paths, and a lot of it. Generally it's balanced pretty well and that leads to the design of level puzzles and secrets. With few exceptions, once I started learning the "language" of Doom's secrets, I started finding them far more easily and learned the "tells" the game uses to indicate them. There's only a few times when a secret came across as entirely too obscure for anyone to notice without randomly grunting into the walls. From using oddly lit patches on the ground to oddly textured walls to (my favorite) simply using the overall layout of an area to hint at a specific spot in it (sometimes literally forming arrows out of sections of the map pointing at one), the game has a very informed idea of how to make a secret.

It became clear that the designers really "got" level design. Much like Miyamoto and Zelda dungeons, this was a time when id too was coming up with a general design philosophy, and both Miyamoto and Romero came up with some of the same solutions. For example, the central "landmark" room is a modern staple of Zelda that started with Link to the Past and continues to this day. Doom too uses this same idea. I also really appreciate that if I can see a location, there's always a way to get there. Very little is purely "decorational" (aside from the occasional monster alcove that clearly has nothing in it worth reaching).

They also do a great job slowly ramping up difficulty and introducing concepts only to iterate further on them later in a level. Each level has a general "theme" with concepts you get taught and which later get taken to greater heights, such as one that starts out in a small room before "opening up" like an inverted Matryoshka doll into a much more massive level, with greater and greater numbers of enemies in each layer. The only exception to a general good flow from easier to harder levels is in the extra "bonus" episode in the first Doom, which unfortunately places it's two toughest levels at the very start (and they are ROUGH, especially the second level which dumps you into a massive room filled with cacodemons from the very start).

This game has earned my respect after years of me mocking it as a dumb shooter. If you never really got into it or grew out of it as a game that's "only interesting because it's gory", I'd give it another chance on it's own terms.

Now that's a loaded question! But lately, we're all thinking it. How could the older generation listen to a single utterance from Trump and think "yes, this guy seems on the level"?

Science itself (that floating cloud of science hovering out there) seems to have something to say.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...121836.htm

Depressing... But if accurate, it isn't 100% so. There's at least a few particular old people who's bunkum radar seems to be functioning just fine in their twilight years, such as James Randi. I can only hope I hold up that well and don't end up falling for some honey lipped politician who's objectively terrible by every metric the future young people know to use.