hugthebed2

I keep getting requests for a single-time access code for my microsoft account and there's no way to disable the emails or that feature from happening.
 
Awesome system. It's rather unlikely they hit the 1 in 1 million chance to log in, but still it's a bit worrying.

Had eye surgery yesterday for my life-long strabismus in my left eye. Went really well according to the doctor, just recovering now and trying to get past the temporary double-vision while my brain adjusts. Apparently I was a bit exceptional, since I did vision therapy for 10 years which kept my affected eye from weakening, so the muscles were still all good and I have 20/20. The doctor was also the successor of the doctor who performed a previous strabismus surgery on me when I was 2, and that guy was basically the best in the U.S., so he was very familiar with his work and knew what to expect going in.
 
Seeing my face in the mirror afterward was so weird, like looking at an alternate universe! My first thought was "Wow, I look like the people on TV or something!"

Which way, Modern Man?
 

it's time again.
 
Unfortunately, I think I really struck gold previously with my chart's theme and I don't think I can beat it. Seeing that all of my favorite games had a pretty significant part where someone was eating shit (two of those games (both detective themed) starting with a shot of the protagonist doing so) was a bolt of inspiration. This triennial chart is good, but there are some obvious odd ducks out. However, I REALLY like the image of Chandlo staring vapidly at one of THE "monochromoatic with a splash of color" games of all time since that's the only instance I could find in Bugsnax. Not too much commentary since I have to get up in the morning.
 
 
 

Fun fact: "Char Aznable" came about from Japanese people mangling the name of the French Armenian singer "Charles Aznavour."
 
Also I don't know if the image is supposed to be related since A Bao A Qu is also related to Gundam (name of the Zeon fortress where the final battle takes place.)  Of course it ultimately goes back to a creature that supposedly follows people who try to climb the Tower of Victory (but was probably made up by Jorge Luis Borges and passed off as an actual myth.)

As someone with very small Gundam knowledge, I always find it funny seeing people say Char Aznable's name.
 
 
Today's new anime girl link monster is "Hikarinaki Kage A=Bao A Qu"
 
 

Also

 
She reached the US markets 25 years ago today.
 
How time flies.

EDIT: Thread theme:
 
 

Water heater broke again, and once again it happened at a time where everything was closed for several days.
 
On the plus side, warranty was for six years so it still counts.
 
On the minus side, this sucks for the reasons stated six years ago.
 
EDIT: I guess for better or worse I've become an expert at this.
 
Pro tips: Use a big bucket for the water used to wash most of your body.  Dip washcloth and soap in as necessary.
 
Use a one gallon pitcher to pour water over your hair to wet and to rinse out shampoo/conditioner.  Follow up with wash cloth and then wet comb to get the remainder out.
 
VERY IMPORTANT TIP: Only fill containers about 3/4 full using tap water directly.  Fill remaining 1/4 with boiling water (you can use an electric kettle or a pot on the stove.)  Preferably do this overnight so that when you wash in the morning the water is about room temperature instead of just above freezing.
 
Even if the water isn't super cold you'll still lose a lot of heat to the air due to the increased length of time it takes to wash.  So put a space heater in the next room and budget 5 minutes or so of time to lie next to it with a blanket.
 
If you get so tired of this shit that you just want a hot shower even if you have to pay for it, truck stops have hot showers you can pay for, and many gyms allow you to buy one day memberships.  I guess shady love hotels that you pay for by the hour are also an option in some areas, and if you have a friend in the same situation you can have wacky romantic comedy misunderstandings when you offer to the split the bill.

I guess I've developed an interest in historical game packs like the SNK collection, since I picked up the Atari 50 collection.  This is an interesting contrast to the SNK collection because to be frank it's something that if you don't have a historical interest in Atari or the early days of video games, it's really not worth it.  Most of the SNK games still hold up so you get a solid collection of games, but many of the games in the Atari set are not things that most people would be interested in playing.  There are a few reasons for this:
 
Since we are literally at the dawn of video games (reports at the time called them part of the "pinball industry") some of the games are extremely primitive.  For example, "Touch Me" is basically just Simon (i.e. push a series of buttons in response to what blinked.)  Games like Breakout are certainly playable, but since they invented a genre later games innovated so much on the basic formula that going back to the original will feel lacking if you've seen anything from later on. Many of the games are two player only, like Pong, Combat and Air Sea Battle are meant to be played 2 player.  There is no AI at all, so no real game unless you have someone else playing.  These games actually do hold up if you are willing to look past their age... but since we are talking about local multiplayer with two controllers only, you will need to find someone to agree to play a mega-old game when you could easily be doing something else.  Not an easy sell. Many of the games are arcade games.  In a way this is nice, since they punched higher than the console games of the time.  But the downside is that sometimes they used special peripherals that you won't have on PC or modern consoles.  In particular, Missile Command, Centipede and Crystal Castles all used a trackball.  I guess there are trackballs you can use with PC, but who has one?  Missile Command and Centipede work pretty well with a mouse and Crystal Castles is at least playable with a joystick, but you are missing a key part of the experience.  Similarly there are some arcade racing games that are meant to be played with a steering wheel, some games meant to be played with a paddle (i.e. a rotational dial like what you use in Pong), etc. Some of the games are just not good.  Sometimes this is due to technical limitations, like what you have on Atari 2600.  Sometimes it's just because the library sucks, like what happened with the Jaguar (but at least you get a historical perspective of why the Jaguar failed.) Some of the actually fun and innovative games are so far back that you really have to stretch your modern imagination to get into them.  Adventure is an example of this; it's a pretty neat little top down action adventure game, but it's also a game where you are a dot carrying an arrow to fight ducks. The collection also suffers from the fact that this is Atari only.  In particular no Activision (made by disgruntled Atari ace employees) so no Pitfall, River Raid, Kaboom!, Keystone Kapers, etc. This is a shame, since those are some of the best games for the 2600.  No tie ins with other companies like Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, Pole Position.  This in particular hurts the Jaguar, since you won't be getting games like Cannon Fodder, Aliens vs. Predator, Theme Park or Rayman, leaving Tempest 2000 as the only great game on the system.
 
With all that being said, there are many games you can have fun with here.  I think that Asteroids, Centipede, Tempest and Missile Command all hold up and help to see how people got obsessed with the arcades in the early 80's.  Cloak and Dagger, Warlords and especially Food Fight are some great arcade games from later.  (Crystal Castles would be perfect if I had a trackball.)  The consoles include a mix of mediocre (but high selling) stuff, experimental games like Club Drive, Ninja Golf, Basketbrawl, Haunted House and Solaris, and even some home brews and unreleased games.  I imagine that you will find at least a few games that you will legitimately enjoy (I recommend starting with Food Fight and Tempest 2000 since those are both pretty straightforward to understand and well done.)
 
There are a lot of repetitions through ports and the like.  For example, with Asteroids you have the original arcade game, the sequel Asteroids deluxe (really more of a remix of the game), ports for the 2600 and 7800 systems and a combined port of Asteroids and Missile Command for Lynx.  Similarly, there are 5 version of Missile Command.  Normally I would say that this is just padding, but there are 109 games in total if you include ports, and if you only include "original" games you still have 77 games.  But what makes this interesting is the historical perspective.  You can see what Asteroids was like in the arcades, then play the 2600 port to see what was available at home.  In some ways the games are very similar, but in other ways the home experience was obviously inferior.  Very unlike today when you can get everything you want on a PC or modern console.
 
In terms of emulation, it has what you would want.  You can mess with filter and border options depending on whether you want a clear view or a simulation of what it would like at the arcade.  Arcade games have DIP switch options to let you change starting lives, freeplay options, etc.  The games for the Atari 2600, 5200, 7800 systems let you control the difficulty switches on the console for similar results and you can mess with the controls.  My only real complaint there is that you can't remap controls for multiple players to a single keyboard; you need a controller for everyone which can get annoying on the 4 player games since I generally don't have 4 controllers connected.  Having two people on controller and two people on opposite sides of the keyboard would work fine.  But let's be honest, I'm never going to get 4 people to agree to play these games so this is a rather minor complaint.

Where the collection shines is in the historical aspect.  You get a good feel for that from the games themselves, but the collection has a timeline mode that is loaded with features.  Digital Eclipse did something similar for the SNK collection, but there it was really just a brief description of various games with some idea of the context, some screen shots, and maybe some promotional art or manual pages.  The Atari collection has that too, but also includes a wealth of video footage including historical interviews, retrospective interviews done for the collection, historical news footage, etc.  They go into a lot more detail on important games that were not included in the collection to give a real feel for how Atari was doing on a year by year basis.  This is particularly the case with Atari's ill-fated Pinball games (the only pinball game in the collection is a virtual table for the Jaguar.)  I like that they aren't shy of saying where there were flops and where there were successes.
 
Like I said with the SNK collection, you can emulate this stuff rather easily, but the historical presentation of the collection really adds to the experience.  Digital Eclipse has found a niche and is doing their best, when they could have easily just slapped a bunch of roms together in a cash grab.  I'll probably pick up their Jeff Minter game collection if it goes on a good sale.  They also have a "Making of Kareteka" collection, but that might be too niche for even me since it focuses entirely on one game (and its many, many, ports.)

A few weeks ago I was healing someone named "Bogus" on a server. And as I Übered them I said "Release the Bogus!" in reference to Super Macho Man from Super Punch Out on the Wii (a game I have only seen, not played).
 
After the Ûber they said "wow I've had my name as this for almost a year and you're the first person to get what I was referencing". Someone else chimed in saying they liked Super Macho Man.
 
I may not be a punch out fan, but I am glad I could make someone's day.

This made me go back to those "Senko's Lab" .webms that got shared a lot years ago. The youtube upload for them has the default community closed captions as russian. Funny
 
 

Things have gotten worse.  Outlook now does markdown formatting.  If you don't know what I mean, it's that thing that's becoming more and more common where you can do stuff like **text** for bold, ~~text~~ for a strike through, etc. The problem is that _text_ is one shortcut for italics.  This is a problem because I often have to send e-mails with subscripts and superscripts on variables.  For subscripts I use _, like a_1, a_2, etc. This works well because it's intuitive and everyone is used to writing things that way in LaTeX anyway.  But now if I say "consider the variables a_1, a_2" outlook will change it to "consider the variables a1, a2."  As with all autocorrects, there doesn't seem to be any way to disable this in the current version.
 
Another annoyance is that it always capitalizes after a period.  So if you use phrases like "i.e.", "et al.", "etc.", "ex." it's going to mess up the formatting on the next letter.  This is annoying enough for normal sentences, but can also cause the types of issues with variable names that I discussed in the last post.
 
It's to the point that when I need to write an e-mail on my work computer I just write it in notepad and then copy paste it.

I've been experimenting with having copilot translate images with Japanese text.  In some ways it's impressive in that it can recognize features in images and talk about them and sometimes pick up specific bits of text.  For example, sometimes it picks up no character names which it couldn't have gotten from elsewhere.
 
But of course, this is all buried in the usual strategy of "just make plausible shit up."  For example, I fed it the pick I modified for Wicket's Birthday:
 


 
It made the claim that the Japanese text is ハッピーバースデーお誕生日おめでとうございます!  If you look at the first part you will see that it is wrong.  It's the katakana for "Happy Birthday" phonetically (i.e. happi-ba-sude-) when in reality this is the phonetics for "Wicket."  Now why would the AI have done this?  Probably because it either recognized the cake and/or the English "Happy Birthday" and thus drew from its birthday related JP responses.  Honestly, I'm kind of skeptical about whether it recognized the お誕生日おめでとうございます, as that is a standard Japanese birthday congratulations and so would reasonably appear in a birthday picture with JP text.
 
Now what makes this weird is that if I specifically ask it what text is in the white box it will say "Wicket-san", meaning that it can parse that text, but it lied about it in the initial response anyway.
 
Here's another example.  I gave it this image of Nora Cat in the rain:
 


 
It claims the image has the text 雨だから便利でしょう? With the meaning "it's convenient because it's raining, right?" referring to an umbrella found that Nora apparently plans to use personally.
 
The actual text is 雨が降って来たので、傘を持ってきましたよ which means something like "because it started raining, I came with an umbrella" with the implication that this is being given to the viewer.  So it looks like this time the AI just made up some phrase that a character in the rain with an umbrella might use.  Again, if ask it for what text is specifically in the text balloons it gives me the right characters (though out of order since it's too dumb to read a manga panel right to left) so it has that capability, but it doesn't use it when asked to translate.
 
But then I feed it this complicated image from Doitsuken, which I thought for sure would stump it due to the highly unusual situation and the amount of text which isn't over a flat image:
 


 
And it pumps out this translation:
 
“私は出来る狐” (Watashi wa dekiru kitsune) - which translates to “I am a capable fox.”
“大丈夫ど私は出来る狐” (Daijoubu do watashi wa dekiru kitsune) - which roughly means “It’s okay, I am a capable fox.”
“運転中に人型解かないでね?” (Unten-chuu ni jingata hodokanai de ne?) - which translates to “Don’t transform into a human shape while driving, okay?”
“君·だんだん戦っぽくなってるけど” (Kimi, dandan ikusa-ppoku natteru kedo) - which means “You’re gradually becoming more like a warrior, though.”
 
That nailed it, there's only three mistakes:
 
1.) As before, it reads in left-right order and not right-left so this is all reversed.
2.) It confuses the kanji 獣 (beast) for 戦 (battle/war).  That is, he's saying that she's shifting back into an animal shape during the driving exam.
3.) It interprets 人型解かない as "don't transform into human shape" when it actually means "don't undo your human form", i.e. don't transform into a fox.
 
Let's try one more, using the intro page that I translated way back before I got too lazy to continue:
 


 
It gives this translation:
 


 
The names and races are accurate, at least.  But "Kitsune Musume", while technically something Kotoha is, appears nowhere in the text.  Shihiru is of course not Kotoha's older brother, being both female and unrelated to her, and no such text appears.  The Personality, likes, dislikes are all made up out of whole cloth.  I tried asking it specifically to translate the text under Kotoha's name, since in other cases asking it to translate specific lines would get something accurate even when it had previously lied.  It tells me  "The text under Kotoha’s name reads “性格：さっぱり” (Seikaku: Sappari), which translates to “Personality: Refreshing/Clear-cut"", which you can verify does not appear in the image.  What it did is take the made up translation and translate it back into Japanese. 
 
I asked it to translate a second time and got this:
 


 
Interestingly the character names are now wrong (though Kotoha's name does appear in Shihiro's description.)  Things aren't perfect; in particular it missed the fact that Kotoha specifically can't hide her ears and tail but otherwise can look human, but far better than the first try.  The problem is definitely not that the AI can't be used to trsnalte this sort of thing but that it won't.
 
I also asked it to translate some chickenscratch handwritten images, but it failed hard on all of those, not that I was expecting it to get anywhere.
 
But all in all that's pretty impressive.  Considering I'm using a free tool, it's certainly clear that current AI can be made to have powerful text recognition, image recognition and text translation capabilities.  However, it's also clear that the current methods for doing it are unreliable, because the AI is apt to make up something at random.  If someone were to optimize each part of the problem, such as text recognition, text translation, image recognition, sentence writing, etc., and then create a general framework to feed information from one part of the model to another, then I think we could get some pretty amazing stuff.  This seems to be more or less what Vedal is trying to do with Neuro-sama and the results so far have been pretty good for a one man team (and let's be honest: Vedal isn't a genius coder.)  But the CS academics are all in on the idea that if we stuff in enough training data then we will have competent "general intelligence" appear out of nowhere, even though every single time these models end up spending more time giving plausible sounding answers than doing what you want.

Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Girl Yuuki was a webcomic about an otaku guy named Yuuki who bought a magical girls anime which was actually a ploy by the Norse god Hermod to recruit a new valkyrie, thus making Yuuki into a valkyrie themed magical girl.  Things are made more complicated by the fact even when he undoes the magical girl transformation, he remains a girl.

A couple years later there was a tokusatsu show in Japan called Holy Girl Warrior St. Valkyrie ( 聖少女戦士 St.ヴァルキリー) about a guy named Yuuki who inherits a magical item from his mother which turns him into a valkyrie themed magical girl.  Things are made more complicated by the fact even when he undoes the magical girl transformation, he remains a girl.
 
No, the webcomic author wasn't involved in the tokusatsu show.  I wouldn't be surprised if most of the staff of the show wasn't even aware the webcomic existed, and this was all done by one writer who snatched the idea without telling anyone.
 
From what I can tell the tokusatsu show seems to have taken major divergences from the webcomic overall.  For example, I can't see any Norse gods showing up despite Hermod and Thor being mainstays in the webcomic.
 
Both of these things are pretty damned obscure these days, so if anyone plans to make a "top 10 things YOU didn't know about Japanese shows" videos this would be a topic to hit.

deadlock is ruining my social time with non-deadlockers

I haven't really gotten into most of it yet, but I thought I'd tell you about another Solitaire game because it seems pretty obscure.  It's A Solitaire Mystery and it's by the Baba is You guy.  As far as I'm aware it's only available on this itch.io page:
 
https://hempuli.itch.io/a-solitaire-mystery
 
Not on Steam or Gog or anything.  The only reason that I know about it is that Jelly from Phase Connect did a stream where she played through the Zachtronics solitaire collection, and then she immediately played through this one too.
 
There's some pretty obvious inspirations from the Zachtronics games.  In particular Tap Solitaire is very, very close to Cluj solitaire: sort cards into stacks but you can cheat by putting a card where it doesn't belong.  In this one suits matter and they are given Baba is You flair, but it's pretty similar.
 
However, there a staggering 23 solitaire games in this collection and many of them are unlike anything that Zachtronics has put out.  There is a bona fide Baba is You solitaire and it's everything you would hope.  The suits are Baba, Keke, etc. There are also four noun cards, four "IS" cards and four attribute cards.  So you can arrange BABA IS +5 which causes the value of all cards in the Baba suit to increase by 5 (looping around on the top.)  Or KEKE IS ANY SUIT which allows you to use the cards in the Keke suit as if they were any suit (except for putting them up in the goal stacks.)  It's easy to overlook, but you can also do things like FOFO IS BABA to make all Fofo cards count as Baba cards.  Captures the spirit of the game nicely while also working as a solitaire game.
 
Some games are pretty close to normal solitaire versions.  For example, Hanoi Solitaire basically has fewer slots but more generous stacking rules that make the game function like the Tower of Hanoi puzzle.  There is a variant of the common Poker Solitaire game that people play in real life (basically you need to move cards to make poker hands to get a certain number of points.)  Others are more fanciful, like Eldritch invasion where all face cards are Lovecraftian monsters that need to be defeated by totaling the correct sum, while being careful not to reveal too many monsters to get killed (yes, there is a "you died" screen.)  Time Travel solitaire lets you take cards from the future, but you need to then return them back when a timer runs out lest you cause a temporal pardox.  52 solitaire basically throws all the cards in a random fashion in a box, and you are only allowed to pick up cards that aren't covered by other cards (i.e. like you start with the aftermath of 52 pickup.)
 
Many fit into the "fucking evil" category.  For example, in chaotic solitaire your card will get swapped after you move it. Lock solitaire prevents you from moving a card for two moves after it is placed, making it very easy to walk into a corner. Binary solitaire just gives you 1's and 0's, but these need to be combined into the numbers 0-7 (i.e. 0, 1, 01, 10, 001, etc.)  Wrapping your brain around how to combine cards and then swap them is a brain buster.  Single card solitaire is even worse: you just have a bunch of blank cards which must be combined into groups to sort properly.  I am sure there will be card games that you absolutely hate in this collection; but with 23 you'll probably find at least one that you like.
 
One thing I like is that each game has some comments on how easy it is to play with a real deck of cards.  This is something that I did with the games in the Zachtronics collection (they are all playable with a deck of playing cards or a deck of Tarot cards except for the alcehmy game, though you have to be creative when playing Shenzan or Kabufuda.)  I particularly enjoy playing Sawayama and Cribbage solitaire with a real deck of card (Cribbage solitaire is actually good practice for playing Cribbage for real.)  So I appreciate having some advice on these new games.  Eldritch invasion seems like it'd be the most fun, especially with a deck of cards where the face cards look appropriately menacing.
 
EDIT: Bonus Jelly meme:
 
 

Took like 7 years but finally completed Persona 5 with friends.
 
First play session stopped from COVID, later bought PC port. That one took forever cuz the person controlling it is insanely good at getting distracted. Regardless, gud gaem.
 
girl choice: 
 

That's a really good question.. the most objective measure would probably be the state of the game itself, which would be briefly after the Pyromania update I'd say. Casual matchmaking worked like a charm, comp matchmaking was still kind of alive, and I have to give it to Valve that, although it sucks they abandoned TF2 after pyromania, at least they left it in the most balanced state it has ever been in, mostly because of the flamethrower and airblast overhauls. 
 
Subjectively speaking I have several ''eras'' of TF2 that I look back on very fondly, mostly because of the people I played with more than the balance of the game itself. The #1 without a doubt that way was very early on, when I played TF2 with a bunch of high school friends. We'd have LAN parties and play all night surviving on kitkats and pizza, it's the super stereotypical 'good old days' but it sure as hell was the best. I'm still in contact with most of them and after everyone dispersed to college we still occasionally played TF2 together. By now, only one of them still sometimes plays TF2, but we still play other things together, so considering we're all boring 30 year olds now I really lucked out with that gang.
 
I also played 6v6 for a while which I still highly recommend everyone to try, it's basically an entirely different game from pub TF2 but it's just so fun. I've played on several teams but the team I played on the longest really was a gang of guys I all liked, and it was a blast to play with them. I have this very vivid memory of playing scout vs soldier MGE on granary last while all hanging in mumble and someone from the team strutting on his guitar, it was the absolute best. The team eventually hit some drama and team members got replaced, and not much later I stopped because I had to focus on university.
 
Then there was when mann vs machine dropped, and cmndr hosted a server on which we could all do the missions together. That was short lived but it was a really cool way to experience that gamemode, especially considering how toxic the MvM community is if you've ever tried to play a game with randoms. So that definitely deserves a shoutout.
 
To round it out, as cheesy as it is, current TF2 on Uncletopia is just... kind of everything I want from the game? I like the ruleset, there's skilled players, and from where I live there are like 20 servers that I can access. It's a shame the servers were born out of the bot crisis, and I haven't really connected much with many of the players on Uncletopia, but I can say for sure that if it wasn't for those servers I would have dropped TF2 by now.

Solly just has really good secondaries, and the Buff Banner can't really keep up. The other banners, shotty and gunboats are all items I equip when I am playing 'optimally', but the buff banner always feels like I'm gimping myself. It should have some kind of passive like the other two banners.
 
I definitely have a bunch of controversial balance ideas, the biggest one being that I think airblast shouldn't be able to push players around at all whilst projectile reflects can stay as they are. Soldier needs a proper heel and there is a lot of interesting counterplay against a reflect happy Pyro, but getting your entire Uber stuffed, or being pushed off a cliff, or getting stuck in a corner by someone holding mouse 2 with the most generous hitbox in the game is not good gameplay.
 
For buffs, there's just such a massive inventory of useless items in TF2 it's kind of hard to start on it. The question is also whether you want them to be really viable or just fun to play; for example the Force a Nature can be fun to use, but if you were to try and turn it into a true sidegrade to the Scattergun, it would have to become obnoxious as hell. On the other hand you have stuff like the Sun on a Stick that just serve no purpose whatsoever.
 
I think the weapons most in dire need for a buff are all the Pyromania pyro unlocks, which just all either fell barely short (Dragon's Fury being able to be reflected and missing an airblast makes you killbind) or just turned out kind of garbage (all the other ones). It's depressing the second banana was actually the most truly viable unlock with TF2's last real update.
 
For a rework it would probably be Spy in its entirety, I really dislike how the 'meta' Spy has turned into Kunai and Dead Ringer abuse. It's quite funny how that combo can give Spy the highest effective health and movement speed in the game and still leave him the weakest class. In my opinion the big issue with Spy is that even if you get a reasonable amount of kills with him, you're still not applying as much pressure as a Soldier/Demo/Heavy shooting down a hallway. Getting kills doesn't mean much in TF2 if you're not gaining ground with it so in 12v12, an invisible spy is just a player down. If Spy was able to provide pressure like the other classes and then go invisible to try to make a play on a flank, he'd feel a lot less absent
 
 
Maybe like 20 or so, I played that kind of maps more when I played TF2 with a group of friends. I actually have some footage recorded of us having a few nostalgic games of prophunt and mario_kart from 2 years ago that I never edited because I forgot editing costs time and effort
 
 
-Brass Beast: should be more extreme, make it unable to move at all and make it deal even more damage. I also rarely play heavy
-Classic: is an awful sniper rifle which means it's still pretty dang good, being able to instagib someone from anywhere
-Thermal Thruster: it's pretty clear valve was scared of bombing pyros because they made this way too restrictive, I wish this was just better because it is quite fun.

According to Steam, I purchased the Orange Box on April 1st, 2009, meaning I played TF2 for approximately an hour every single day since then. There's definitely been times in the past where I played it waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much to get to that number; nowadays I don't have time to game that often anymore and it's just my comfort game.
 
Anyways I thought that was a good reason to start a subspuf thread, see how y'all are doing, and maybe talk about TF2 a bit

It really is a far cry from the days of being taught in school "be careful what you post online - it's there forever!".
 
There's many solo amateur websites over the years I've seen that just don't exist anymore, and their pages were not put on the web archive. There's also so many youtube videos I adored lost to channels being deleted or intentional privating. I should really youtube-dl more than I do.

One of my favorite things to think about with stuff like gambling (unboxing crates or IRL) is that both players and the corporations will only share the big wins, thus making it seem like people win often.
 
But like, unusuals in TF2 are 1 in 150 (wiki said 1/100 for many many years). Strange knifes in CS:GO are 1 in 1500. CS2 and TF2 don't even announce to people what you unbox unless you're in a server doing the unboxxing (though valve did take the "advertise big wins" with the golden frying pan).
 
I kinda wish it was a rule for forums and stuff to say how many attempts it took to get their epic heirlooms or australium drop to help dissuade people from wasting money. But as is, people will unbox an unusual and go OMG MY FIRST UNUSUAL and post a phone picture of their screen. Which is fine, it's exciting being lucky! But many times people will reveal "yeah I'd unbox once per paycheck".

I think I've mentioned once that I accidentally complimented a novice/indie music maker back in my CS:GO days when I complimented the person's music on their Tumblr page (they were like "i made that ty so much").
 
But another similar story is that when they first added the emotes to steam, I saw and joined the "emote art" steam group where people were making art with emotes on their profiles. I saw this thread (https://steamcommunity.com/groups/emoticonart/discussions/0/666827974867330650/) and I had to get those guncraft emotes for myself.
 
I've had this Mario on my page since the week it was posted, 2013

 
I know a lotta people here were victim to my "hey can I send u a Link" and then I'd post an Emote-Link (from legend of zelda) afterward.
 
Anyways, come 2019 I find a thread of some person making a bunch of fixes for L4D2 maps using pretty advanced techniques with the hope that one day Valve will add them to the game (https://steamcommunity.com/app/550/discussions/1/1651043320659915818/?tscn=1598588468). 2020 hits and The Last Stand update gets announced for L4D2 and I was like "wow those map changes listed on the announcement video... I bet I know who did those!"
So I added him after making a post.

 
It was then that he complimented my Mario ascii art on my profile... then we both realized that he had made that same pixel art 7 years earlier. A shame he didn't know I did L4D2 mapping stuff cuz I would've been on the community update team and had my name on the update page/in the game (and I would've been able to work on the update - damn!)...
 
At least I'm on that same community update team now, but even we must abide by Valve time. Most of the map-related bullet points on this update: https://steamcommunity.com/games/L4D2/announcements/detail/3646280012042428637?snr=2___ were done by me!!!

Hopefully we get a new community update, at some point.

I think I've mentioned once that I accidentally complimented a novice/indie music maker back in my CS:GO days when I complimented the person's music on their Tumblr page (they were like "i made that ty so much").
 
But another similar story is that when they first added the emotes to steam, I saw and joined the "emote art" steam group where people were making art with emotes on their profiles. I saw this thread (https://steamcommunity.com/groups/emoticonart/discussions/0/666827974867330650/) and I had to get those guncraft emotes for myself.
 
I've had this Mario on my page since the week it was posted, 2013

 
I know a lotta people here were victim to my "hey can I send u a Link" and then I'd post an Emote-Link (from legend of zelda) afterward.
 
Anyways, come 2019 I find a thread of some person making a bunch of fixes for L4D2 maps using pretty advanced techniques with the hope that one day Valve will add them to the game (https://steamcommunity.com/app/550/discussions/1/1651043320659915818/?tscn=1598588468). 2020 hits and The Last Stand update gets announced for L4D2 and I was like "wow those map changes listed on the announcement video... I bet I know who did those!"
So I added him after making a post.

 
It was then that he complimented my Mario ascii art on my profile... then we both realized that he had made that same pixel art 7 years earlier. A shame he didn't know I did L4D2 mapping stuff cuz I would've been on the community update team and had my name on the update page/in the game (and I would've been able to work on the update - damn!)...
 
At least I'm on that same community update team now, but even we must abide by Valve time. Most of the map-related bullet points on this update: https://steamcommunity.com/games/L4D2/announcements/detail/3646280012042428637?snr=2___ were done by me!!!

Hopefully we get a new community update, at some point.

I think I've mentioned once that I accidentally complimented a novice/indie music maker back in my CS:GO days when I complimented the person's music on their Tumblr page (they were like "i made that ty so much").
 
But another similar story is that when they first added the emotes to steam, I saw and joined the "emote art" steam group where people were making art with emotes on their profiles. I saw this thread (https://steamcommunity.com/groups/emoticonart/discussions/0/666827974867330650/) and I had to get those guncraft emotes for myself.
 
I've had this Mario on my page since the week it was posted, 2013

 
I know a lotta people here were victim to my "hey can I send u a Link" and then I'd post an Emote-Link (from legend of zelda) afterward.
 
Anyways, come 2019 I find a thread of some person making a bunch of fixes for L4D2 maps using pretty advanced techniques with the hope that one day Valve will add them to the game (https://steamcommunity.com/app/550/discussions/1/1651043320659915818/?tscn=1598588468). 2020 hits and The Last Stand update gets announced for L4D2 and I was like "wow those map changes listed on the announcement video... I bet I know who did those!"
So I added him after making a post.

 
It was then that he complimented my Mario ascii art on my profile... then we both realized that he had made that same pixel art 7 years earlier. A shame he didn't know I did L4D2 mapping stuff cuz I would've been on the community update team and had my name on the update page/in the game (and I would've been able to work on the update - damn!)...
 
At least I'm on that same community update team now, but even we must abide by Valve time. Most of the map-related bullet points on this update: https://steamcommunity.com/games/L4D2/announcements/detail/3646280012042428637?snr=2___ were done by me!!!

Hopefully we get a new community update, at some point.