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Cake day: August 21st, 2024

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  • I haven’t been to Burger King in years, but I have been feeling the call of the void the past few times I’ve been traveling and needed a place to stop and grab some food.

    I stopped eating at “BK” for the better part of a decade after I got terribly sick from eating one of their “Rodeo Burgers”. It was basically the low-end burger option, except they replaced the onion with onion rings and used ketchup-based barbecue for the sauce.

    The onion rings must’ve been the previous day’s unsold rejects or something. I remember having the worst heartburn I’ve ever experienced in my life and then feeling so terribly sick for the next 2 days.

    I’m 99% sure I have had BK since then, but it was breakfast-only.

    Back in the day, it was the only fast food option for onion rings where I was growing up. They sucked compared to the real thing, but despite that they had their appeal. Now my stomach turns just thinking about them.



  • In this thread: I’m mostly finding people I feel I need to add to my “no longer like them” list for irreconcilable differences.

    I’m having a hard time deciding what qualifies as “HATED” or highly disliked.

    A lot of people hated Edge of Tomorrow because Tom Cruise. But I am actually quite fond of the movie.

    A lot of people hate Apocolypto, and it’s objectively a terrible movie from a historical as well as moral/ethical perspective, I don’t disagree there. But at the end of the day it is entertaining if you can turn your brain off.




  • During the few months of the year I consider to be my “gaming season”, I mostly stick to 1 game at a time as my primary focus, but I’ll often have a game or few on the back burner that I’ll work into the schedule now and then.

    This year I’m focusing on the Doom remake (Doom 2016) as my main game. To be honest, the game is stressful for me, so even though it’s been an absolute blast for me to play, it’s nice to have some alternative games to switch over to after I’m done with Doom.

    I agree, it’s very hard to keep up with the stories when juggling multiple games at the same time. Almost as hard for me, if not harder, is keeping up with the controls. Every game is different. Games in the same genre can and will have vastly different control set-ups. Even games in the same franchise / series can have different controls from game to game. Yuck.

    So, the control aspect and the story aspect are part of my inspiration for my secondary games. Right now I’m playing Halls of Torment. I guess there’s a story? But it doesn’t seem super relevant or necessary to keep up with. This game is in the same genre as another secondary game I play (and the main one from last year) called Vampire Survivors. Controls for both of these games is super basic. As I mentioned, if there’s even a story line to them, it’s irrelevant to my enjoyment of them.

    I also have the Castlevania Dominus Collection which is includes all the metroidvania-style Castlevania games from the Nintendo DS. I played all of them back in the day on original hardware, so there’s a great deal of “recall” in terms of controls and story. And this is probably one of my favorite genres of game.


  • I’m not saying it’s completely 100% not possible and has never happened in the history of human technology, but the situation is not as ubiquitous as most people seem to think it is.

    Don’t get me wrong, collecting and inferring personal information is happening on an epic and ubiquitous scale these days, but for the most part, it’s not the microphones on your devices that are doing the data collection.

    Pretty much all my older relatives are completely convinced their phones are listening to their day to day conversations and serving up ads based on those conversations. One of them came to visit me for a week over the summer. One night we had been talking about having asparagus for dinner, and as evidence that their phone was listening to us, the next day they showed me that their news feed was filled with asparagus recipes. Another night, we were talking about one of their medical conditions and the drugs they were taking, and the next day they showed me that they got notifications about a prescription drug for that condition. On another day, we had been talking about a specific actor’s filmography and all their movies that we liked, the next day their streaming video app was suggesting a bunch of content from that actor.

    I can understand why this seemed pretty convincing that our phones were listening to us, but consider the simpler explanation.

    I live in a rural area where there’s not good cellular reception, so for the most part, our phones are connected via wifi to the same internet connection. Essentially, every device on the property has the same external IP address. So, when I looked up asparagus recipes on my laptop later that night because I wanted to surprise my relative with that specific dish, and when I Googled the prescription medication the relative was taking to see what the side effects where, and when I looked up that actor on IMBD to see what all movies they’d been in, that pretty much gave all the advertisers all the information they needed to start targeting ads and recommendations to folks sharing the same IP address.

    Occam’s Razor being what it is, I assume that’s how things went down versus all our conversations being constantly recorded and uploaded to the net to be interpreted and used for the purposes of serving ads.


  • Even before current LLM-style AI systems became mainstream, a noticeable portion of the most popular submissions on that and similar/related subs seemed to be “fake” to me. So, I’m not so sure AI alone changed that dynamic that much. One thing that seems to have changed, though, is that people are now more willing to believe a fake post is fake. There was a time when someone would question the authenticity of a submission, and there was a greater than 85% chance someone would call them out by saying “nothing ever happens” or linking to a sub of similar name.

    On the other hand, I feel like a lot of people genuinely believe they have are much better at detecting AI generated text than they are. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had people reply to me by saying things like “Nice Chat-GPT you got there” or something along those lines. I mean, the typos alone should be a clue.






  • Over the past year? Probably Vampire Survivors.

    As of late? Doom (the 2016 reboot).

    Of all time? I’m actually not sure, especially if you include my pre-internet / pre-always-being-spied-on-and-tracked history. But probably it would be one of the Street Fighter 2 iterations.

    I don’t think I’ve even played 450 hours total of games in the past 25+ years, though. So, I’m probably a bit of an outlier around here.


  • Does the Steam Deck count as Linux Gaming? I assume it does, but honestly in the year 2024 and on niche forums I never know.

    If it does count, then I bet my gaming percent is nearly as high. I prefer the larger screen on my laptop and some games that I play don’t run (or don’t run as well) on the Deck, but otherwise everything else about the Steam Deck makes it the superior experience.