Gyokuyoutama

the title is correct, this is indeed music

During the whole "freedom fries" debacle I was at a restaurant in Wyoming that offered "Freedom Dip."  It took me a good five minutes to figure out what the hell they meant by that.  I was familiar with the "Freedom Fries" replacement but using "freedom" as a general replacement for "French" in all contexts was still weird.
 
As for the Kiev thing; note how few people say "Paree" in English, despite obsessing over that.  I mean you can get into how we should be saying Wien for Vienna, Muenchen for Munich, Varsawa for Warsaw, etc.  But I think that most English speakers are familiar with the term "Paree" (I mean, it's always "Gay Paree" not "Gay Paris," right?) But no one says it that way even when trying to be sophisticated.
 
I'm also a bit annoyed too by the fact that the media consistently mangles American city names, despite these having real "correct" English pronunciations.  I'm talking about stuff like "Eelai Minnesota" (for Ely, should be pronounced "Eelee"), "Pee-air South Dakota" (for Pierre, should be pronounced Peer), etc.  The Midwest and Rockies regions are loaded with cities which are routinely mispronounced.
 
 We've also had the ridiculous "Beizhing" pronunciation which sounds nothing like the Chinese pronunciation of 北京 but was the "correct" pronunciation during the Olympics anyway.  (But really, you should be saying "Peiking."  And I'm not just saying that since I'm a weeb (as that's the Japanese prounciation.))

I've always maintained that it's a planet, but I've never really looked into it - I just never saw why I should stop calling it a planet other than "because we said so."
 
There's also things like everyone suddenly calling Kiev Kyiv. Kiev was always the English name for the city, but because Russia did a bad (and I'm not arguing that they didn't) suddenly it became in vogue to call it Kyiv. Exonyms being changed to endonyms is usually based on politics or social brownie points as exonyms are usually much more comfortable for their speakers to pronounce and write - we don't call Vienna "Wien" because quite frankly Wien sounds stupid in English.
 
It's also the same sort of thinking as calling French fries "Freedom fries". Basically, I'm pissed off at you for some reason, so I'm going to damnatio memoriae your name from things you're barely related to. It's not a new thing of course, but it's still baffling to see people try to pretend that these linguistic changes are purely agnostic. If you want to say Kyiv because you hate Russia and think they're evil, just say so. You don't need to try to justify it.
 
Side note: I once saw a guy refer to the Red Army as the PKKA (he was a native English speaker making a post in English) and that pissed me off because it was so unnecessary I had to Google it despite being fairly well-versed in WWII.

This really could have gone in "what grinds your gears" or something like that, but I'm putting this as a new thread because I'm sick of trying to fit an observation into an existing thread only for it to go nowhere.  If you want to continue this thread you can either respond to the immediate topic, or put whatever other random thoughts you have about how society reacts to things in here.  Honestly any discussion of anything would be good for the boards at this point.
 
With that out of the way, I am one of those people who will say "Pluto is a planet" when asked about it.  Of course, I'm also liable to say that the Sun and Moon are planets, since that's how the ancients viewed things.
 
UNNECESSASRY WEEB TANGENT:
 
 
Anyway, back to Pluto.  Why do I feel strongly about this?  Because how a person reacts to Pluto is a good way of gauging that person's ability to actually think abstractly.  If a person insists "NO, Pluto cannot be a planet!" without elaboration, it usually indicates that he's pretty dull when it comes to other matters too.
 
Now to be clear, there are good reasons for not classifying Pluto as one of the "major" planets.  The main reason being so that we can more easily classify how many "major planets" there are and understand their broad properties.  Once you include Pluto as a planet it becomes very difficult to not also include things like the asteroid Ceres as a planet, or the similarly distant objects Orcus and Eris.  Now for me, I just say "okay, those things are planets too."  The only way to avoid this is to use the ancient astronomical definition (i.e. a consistent visible object in the sky that doesn't follow the path of the fixed stars, but this would not only force the Sun and Moon to be planets, but would disqualify things like Neptune as being planets since it isn't visible to the naked eye.)  There's nothing that says we can't have tons of planets, so the more the merrier.  But I understand why astronomers may see alternate definitions that let them talk about the planets with more certainty, since the truth is that once you include things like Orcus as a "planet" then it's unclear how many undiscovered "planets" there may be.
 
And that's essentially at the heart of why astronomers were hesitant to continue calling Pluto a planet.  And they decided it shouldn't be, so case closed right?
 
Well no, for several reasons.
 
First, what gives scientist authority over the whole human language in this way?  It reminds me of people who object to phrases like "it's in my blood" saying that you should instead say "it's in my DNA" to be more scientific, and really spazzing over things like "hearing that makes my blood boil."  Or to go outside of science, it really pisses me off when I hear someone say something like "the chance of that happening was more than 5%, so you can't call it 'significant.'"  That's a huge abuse of statistical lingo, obviously many things in English are "significant" which have nothing to do with chance, and certainly nothing to do with a specific threshold of probability.  The ways that words are used in normal English are obviously different from their scientific definitions.  Regardless of what astronomers say, Pluto meets the intuitive sense of "planet", so why not keep calling it that?
 
Second, the official term for Pluto is a "Dwarf Planet."  So the technical statement is "Pluto is not a planet because it is a dwarf planet."  In standard English this statement is pretty dumb.  It makes clear that the motivation was primarily one of convenience; that is, it's not that astronomers thought that it was completely unreasonable to call Pluto a planet.  Certainly it acted like a planet in other ways.  But for technical reasons to make their lives workable they needed it to be in a separate category, hence "dwarf planet."  Note that you can just as easily distinguish the situation by putting the "normal" planets in a special category, such as saying "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are the major planets of the solar system. Other objects may be planets, but they aren't major planets."  And indeed some sources do exactly this. (Though I understand why this term wasn't adopted by the scientific community; "Major Planet" has also been used to refer to the gas giants only, i.e. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.)  So if we are just talking about modifications of the word "planet" were some count as "scientifically planets" and others do not, then that is all the more reason to call Pluto a "planet" in daily speech.
 
Third, and by the biggest, is that the actual definition change was not universally accepted even among scientists, and only came into existence due to procedural shenanigans.  In the votes leading up to the decisive one, the majority of astronomers present actually voted for Pluto remaining a planet.  The decisive vote happened when 500 astronomers remained at the conference, out of 2,400 total who had attended previously and participated in votes.  The final vote didn't have a count since it was viewed as "overwhelming" but has been estimated as about 400 out of the remaining 500, meaning that the issue was decided by one sixth of the astronomers from the conference, which of course is only a subset of astronomers across the world.  I've heard claims that the anti-Pluto faction arranged to stay as long as possible and then do a vote after everyone thought the matter was settled.  I don't have proof for this, but I've seen basically identical stunts pulled in academia, so I 100% believe that this what happened.  Then immediately after the vote, they sent out press releases making "Pluto is not a planet" the top story across the world.  At that point it was too awkward for the pro-Pluto faction to press the issue; it would have just made the astronomy community look petty and the definition was always a bit arbitrary anyway, so it became accepted.  But if the anti-Pluto faction had not conspired to vote when their opponents were largely absent, or had not announced their triumph to the press, probably Pluto would still be called a planet (without the "dwarf" qualification) even by astronomers.
 
So, getting back to the original point, when people blindly say "Pluto is not a planet!" without giving reasons beyond "that is what science says!" what they are easily manipulatable merely by hearing something in an "official" source.  Let's say tomorrow that 50 or so scientists came together and put together a press statement saying that the sky is green.  That is, the actual visible color is green, and that if you think it is blue, then this is because your eyes are defective.  These people would immediately start saying "yes, the sky is green" and would even go so far as to select green paints to color the sky in their drawings.  They would not sit back and say "but it looks to me like the sky is blue..." instead they would just accept what is told to them.  Of course, there is nothing new in this phenomenon, since what I am describing is essentially the same behavior parodied in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes."
 
Now at the end of the day it doesn't really matter if we call Pluto a "planet" or a "dwarf planet."  It's not like it's a moral failing to call it a "dwarf planet," especially if you are doing so to make astronomical classification easier (and are consistent with your definitions.)  But it does serve as a good shibboleth to see where else someone might be misled.  I leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine other fads that the public has bought into in the last ten years, in the same way that they bought into Pluto not being a planet.

This really could have gone in "what grinds your gears" or something like that, but I'm putting this as a new thread because I'm sick of trying to fit an observation into an existing thread only for it to go nowhere.  If you want to continue this thread you can either respond to the immediate topic, or put whatever other random thoughts you have about how society reacts to things in here.  Honestly any discussion of anything would be good for the boards at this point.
 
With that out of the way, I am one of those people who will say "Pluto is a planet" when asked about it.  Of course, I'm also liable to say that the Sun and Moon are planets, since that's how the ancients viewed things.
 
UNNECESSASRY WEEB TANGENT:
 
 
Anyway, back to Pluto.  Why do I feel strongly about this?  Because how a person reacts to Pluto is a good way of gauging that person's ability to actually think abstractly.  If a person insists "NO, Pluto cannot be a planet!" without elaboration, it usually indicates that he's pretty dull when it comes to other matters too.
 
Now to be clear, there are good reasons for not classifying Pluto as one of the "major" planets.  The main reason being so that we can more easily classify how many "major planets" there are and understand their broad properties.  Once you include Pluto as a planet it becomes very difficult to not also include things like the asteroid Ceres as a planet, or the similarly distant objects Orcus and Eris.  Now for me, I just say "okay, those things are planets too."  The only way to avoid this is to use the ancient astronomical definition (i.e. a consistent visible object in the sky that doesn't follow the path of the fixed stars, but this would not only force the Sun and Moon to be planets, but would disqualify things like Neptune as being planets since it isn't visible to the naked eye.)  There's nothing that says we can't have tons of planets, so the more the merrier.  But I understand why astronomers may see alternate definitions that let them talk about the planets with more certainty, since the truth is that once you include things like Orcus as a "planet" then it's unclear how many undiscovered "planets" there may be.
 
And that's essentially at the heart of why astronomers were hesitant to continue calling Pluto a planet.  And they decided it shouldn't be, so case closed right?
 
Well no, for several reasons.
 
First, what gives scientist authority over the whole human language in this way?  It reminds me of people who object to phrases like "it's in my blood" saying that you should instead say "it's in my DNA" to be more scientific, and really spazzing over things like "hearing that makes my blood boil."  Or to go outside of science, it really pisses me off when I hear someone say something like "the chance of that happening was more than 5%, so you can't call it 'significant.'"  That's a huge abuse of statistical lingo, obviously many things in English are "significant" which have nothing to do with chance, and certainly nothing to do with a specific threshold of probability.  The ways that words are used in normal English are obviously different from their scientific definitions.  Regardless of what astronomers say, Pluto meets the intuitive sense of "planet", so why not keep calling it that?
 
Second, the official term for Pluto is a "Dwarf Planet."  So the technical statement is "Pluto is not a planet because it is a dwarf planet."  In standard English this statement is pretty dumb.  It makes clear that the motivation was primarily one of convenience; that is, it's not that astronomers thought that it was completely unreasonable to call Pluto a planet.  Certainly it acted like a planet in other ways.  But for technical reasons to make their lives workable they needed it to be in a separate category, hence "dwarf planet."  Note that you can just as easily distinguish the situation by putting the "normal" planets in a special category, such as saying "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are the major planets of the solar system. Other objects may be planets, but they aren't major planets."  And indeed some sources do exactly this. (Though I understand why this term wasn't adopted by the scientific community; "Major Planet" has also been used to refer to the gas giants only, i.e. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.)  So if we are just talking about modifications of the word "planet" were some count as "scientifically planets" and others do not, then that is all the more reason to call Pluto a "planet" in daily speech.
 
Third, and by the biggest, is that the actual definition change was not universally accepted even among scientists, and only came into existence due to procedural shenanigans.  In the votes leading up to the decisive one, the majority of astronomers present actually voted for Pluto remaining a planet.  The decisive vote happened when 500 astronomers remained at the conference, out of 2,400 total who had attended previously and participated in votes.  The final vote didn't have a count since it was viewed as "overwhelming" but has been estimated as about 400 out of the remaining 500, meaning that the issue was decided by one sixth of the astronomers from the conference, which of course is only a subset of astronomers across the world.  I've heard claims that the anti-Pluto faction arranged to stay as long as possible and then do a vote after everyone thought the matter was settled.  I don't have proof for this, but I've seen basically identical stunts pulled in academia, so I 100% believe that this what happened.  Then immediately after the vote, they sent out press releases making "Pluto is not a planet" the top story across the world.  At that point it was too awkward for the pro-Pluto faction to press the issue; it would have just made the astronomy community look petty and the definition was always a bit arbitrary anyway, so it became accepted.  But if the anti-Pluto faction had not conspired to vote when their opponents were largely absent, or had not announced their triumph to the press, probably Pluto would still be called a planet (without the "dwarf" qualification) even by astronomers.
 
So, getting back to the original point, when people blindly say "Pluto is not a planet!" without giving reasons beyond "that is what science says!" what they are easily manipulatable merely by hearing something in an "official" source.  Let's say tomorrow that 50 or so scientists came together and put together a press statement saying that the sky is green.  That is, the actual visible color is green, and that if you think it is blue, then this is because your eyes are defective.  These people would immediately start saying "yes, the sky is green" and would even go so far as to select green paints to color the sky in their drawings.  They would not sit back and say "but it looks to me like the sky is blue..." instead they would just accept what is told to them.  Of course, there is nothing new in this phenomenon, since what I am describing is essentially the same behavior parodied in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes."
 
Now at the end of the day it doesn't really matter if we call Pluto a "planet" or a "dwarf planet."  It's not like it's a moral failing to call it a "dwarf planet," especially if you are doing so to make astronomical classification easier (and are consistent with your definitions.)  But it does serve as a good shibboleth to see where else someone might be misled.  I leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine other fads that the public has bought into in the last ten years, in the same way that they bought into Pluto not being a planet.

Large Dog Lady is impersonating a police officer and intimidating random passerby to steal their groceries. Towards the end, Lil' Fox Dude starts catching on but he's afraid of what she'll do if he calls her out directly. After all, she's about ten times his size, and might have a concealed firearm. So instead he offers to call the police station and turn himself in. LDL panics, knowing that this will blow her cover. She starts screaming about hentai in order to cause a smokescreen of embarassed confusion, and promptly escapes before LFD can get the spaghetti back in his pocket.

"OY YOU GOT A LOICENSE FOR DEM GROWSHREES?"

I actually found a workaround for changing icons on the start menu:
Go to file directory containing program. Make new shortcut for program. Change the icon on the shortcut.  You can change the name, but that won't show up in the start menu. Pin the original program to the start menu. If you try to pin the shortcut nothing will happen. For some reason Windows pins the shortcut to the start menu with your icon.  The name is always "XXXX - Shortcut" though. If you want to change the icon again you have to do this: First unpin the icon from start. Then delete the shortcut. Then make a new shortcut following the above instructions and pin the original program. (If you unpin the program and repin it, then Windows will pin the program and not the shortcut, hence using the original icon.) The fact that this is possible makes me more disgusted in Windows 10 than if it were impossible.  If it was just that icons couldn't change, that would be retarded but at least it could have been a conscious design decision.  The fact that you can do something like this both shows that it would be easy to implement this functionality, and also that the current state of Windows has all sorts of bizarre interactions between partial implementations of code.

Thoughts on Windows OS's, or rather public perception of them.
 
Windows XP is the king.  The only people who don't say this are the people who never used it or were thrown off by the default menu styles (which could easily be changed.)
 
Windows 7 is also well liked, because it currently holds the status of "the last good version of Windows."  It probably will maintain that status forever, honestly.
 
I think Windows 3.x and 98 are in the category of liked by people who use them, but a bit too old and obscure to have much perception in the general consciousness.
 
Windows 95 and Windows 2000 are in the "fine, but why bother using them" category.  I.e. 95 works but you might as well use 98 and 2000 works but you might as well use XP.  There's some point to using them with how good emulation tools are (so you might as well use the version of windows that a program was specifically designed for) but yeah 98 and 2000 almost make these obsolete.  (Though I guess Windows 2000 does allow compatibility with some hardware that XP does not, so maybe the question is really why use 98 when you could use 2000, I dunno.)
 
I think that Vista should be in the same category, in that it's fine but honestly you might as well use Windows 7.  But it will forever be tainted by its disastrous rollout.  If Microsoft had waited until drivers were common for Vista before pressuring PC manufactures to roll out with Vista, and didn't force it on to low end PCs that couldn't handle Aero, I think that Vista wouldn't have the bad reputation it does.  It does have some actually neat features; for example it's a hell of a lot easier setting up a LAN on Vista than XP.
 
ME is basically like Vista, but it deserves it.  Disastrous rollout, but never got into a usable state before being obsoleted by XP, and to make matters worse Windows 2000 was a better OS that had come out earlier.
 
The number of people who have actually used Windows 1.x and 2.x are miniscule, and there's really no point to using them as opposed to 3.0, 3.1 or 3.11.  You can't even have overlapping windows in 1.x.  Not that I'm saying they were horrible, since the very concept of a GUI on an OS was new at the time, but there's no point to them now except very particular historical interest, and they are largely unknown in the public consciousness.
 
Windows 8 was a mistake the whole way through, though it's unclear if Microsoft actually learned anything from it in the long term.  I do give it credit for trying to mix things up, since a lot of the Windows GUI has just lasted by inertia even if it is not particularly functional, but lazily copying smartphone design was not the way to go.  However Windows 8 did do wonders for the popularity of Windows 7 (I think before Windows 8 the consensus was that Windows 7 certainly was usable, but that XP was a better operating system for the time.  But after 8 came out you started having people legitimately argue that Windows 7 was the best of the OS line.)
 
Windows 10 isn't hated because it is usable, but it's pretty rough when compared to Windows 7.  This is definitely the version of Windows where Microsoft really started going "fuck you you don't own your computer, we do" though thankfully most of the worst of that stuff can be disabled.  The real problem with Windows 10 is that no one involved really knows what it is supposed to be.  I still don't understand why the start menu has an alphabetical listing of programs and I especially don't understand why you can't disable that entirely or replace it with a more convenient navigation system.  System settings are usually scattered across ten different places, often with overlaps and often with options that lie (in that nothing happens when you select them.)  Often workarounds work for a while and then mysteriously break for reasons that no one, not even Microsoft developers, understand.  It's a mess; a much bigger mess than Windows Vista, and I think it's more confused than Windows 8.  The only lesson that Microsoft really learned coming from 8 was "don't copy smartphones on desktop."
 
Windows 11 just doubles down on everything bad about Windows 10, and lazily steals design styles from Apple as a cherry on top.  But like 8 before, it is doing a good job of making people like the previous operating system.

Honestly upgrading from windows 7 to 10 the few changes I noticed only annoyed me for a bit. The weird automated random nature pictures on the log in screen which I gave up figuring how to disable being one of the few I even remember. Also having to pin my computer or whatever it's called now (this pc overview or something) to the task bar since the start menu and search both made navigating far more difficult than it needed to be and even getting to my computer using start was a pain since it would be buried among like a dozen random apps. I mean, I could go to documents or open file location and then just click over to it, but it was weird to even need to do something so round about get to basic folder navigation. Still dont understand why that's something they felt the need to hide. I guess because they want everyone to use microsoft app shit instead of manually installing programs but idk does anyone actually do that shit? Freeware without ad shit is so easy to find.

Thoughts on Windows OS's, or rather public perception of them.
 
Windows XP is the king.  The only people who don't say this are the people who never used it or were thrown off by the default menu styles (which could easily be changed.)
 
Windows 7 is also well liked, because it currently holds the status of "the last good version of Windows."  It probably will maintain that status forever, honestly.
 
I think Windows 3.x and 98 are in the category of liked by people who use them, but a bit too old and obscure to have much perception in the general consciousness.
 
Windows 95 and Windows 2000 are in the "fine, but why bother using them" category.  I.e. 95 works but you might as well use 98 and 2000 works but you might as well use XP.  There's some point to using them with how good emulation tools are (so you might as well use the version of windows that a program was specifically designed for) but yeah 98 and 2000 almost make these obsolete.  (Though I guess Windows 2000 does allow compatibility with some hardware that XP does not, so maybe the question is really why use 98 when you could use 2000, I dunno.)
 
I think that Vista should be in the same category, in that it's fine but honestly you might as well use Windows 7.  But it will forever be tainted by its disastrous rollout.  If Microsoft had waited until drivers were common for Vista before pressuring PC manufactures to roll out with Vista, and didn't force it on to low end PCs that couldn't handle Aero, I think that Vista wouldn't have the bad reputation it does.  It does have some actually neat features; for example it's a hell of a lot easier setting up a LAN on Vista than XP.
 
ME is basically like Vista, but it deserves it.  Disastrous rollout, but never got into a usable state before being obsoleted by XP, and to make matters worse Windows 2000 was a better OS that had come out earlier.
 
The number of people who have actually used Windows 1.x and 2.x are miniscule, and there's really no point to using them as opposed to 3.0, 3.1 or 3.11.  You can't even have overlapping windows in 1.x.  Not that I'm saying they were horrible, since the very concept of a GUI on an OS was new at the time, but there's no point to them now except very particular historical interest, and they are largely unknown in the public consciousness.
 
Windows 8 was a mistake the whole way through, though it's unclear if Microsoft actually learned anything from it in the long term.  I do give it credit for trying to mix things up, since a lot of the Windows GUI has just lasted by inertia even if it is not particularly functional, but lazily copying smartphone design was not the way to go.  However Windows 8 did do wonders for the popularity of Windows 7 (I think before Windows 8 the consensus was that Windows 7 certainly was usable, but that XP was a better operating system for the time.  But after 8 came out you started having people legitimately argue that Windows 7 was the best of the OS line.)
 
Windows 10 isn't hated because it is usable, but it's pretty rough when compared to Windows 7.  This is definitely the version of Windows where Microsoft really started going "fuck you you don't own your computer, we do" though thankfully most of the worst of that stuff can be disabled.  The real problem with Windows 10 is that no one involved really knows what it is supposed to be.  I still don't understand why the start menu has an alphabetical listing of programs and I especially don't understand why you can't disable that entirely or replace it with a more convenient navigation system.  System settings are usually scattered across ten different places, often with overlaps and often with options that lie (in that nothing happens when you select them.)  Often workarounds work for a while and then mysteriously break for reasons that no one, not even Microsoft developers, understand.  It's a mess; a much bigger mess than Windows Vista, and I think it's more confused than Windows 8.  The only lesson that Microsoft really learned coming from 8 was "don't copy smartphones on desktop."
 
Windows 11 just doubles down on everything bad about Windows 10, and lazily steals design styles from Apple as a cherry on top.  But like 8 before, it is doing a good job of making people like the previous operating system.

I finished Final Fantasy 2, its a game that I always started, but either stopped midway or forgot about it.
People say its a bad game because of the leveling system, but MAN, there is so much more bad stuff, like the story, hidden mechanics, difficulty spikes.
 
The leveling system is ok at first, even Elder Scolls eventually started to use a similar system. The problem is that its either too easy to level or stats, or incredibly boring.
HP and MP are very easy, just lose them and you get more. Attacking yourself works the best because of hidden stats and mechanics.
But stuff like agility, evasion, equipment proficiency and magic have different ways to level, either requiring constant use or luck.
 
Talking about hidden stats and mechanics, this game is filled with them. It never explains stuff, equipment has hidden debuffs, stats have different leveling formulas.
To increase agility, you need light equipment, but the game never really tells what is light equipment. Also, agility depends on itself to increase, characters with more agility get even more easier.
Weapon proficiency and magic levels require constant use, but eventually they just stop leveling. There is a hidden rank system that stops you from gaining exp if your enemies are too "low rank". Eventually you need to attack yourself to level these at a constant rate, but even then it takes hundreds of uses to level once.
Armor can have evasion, magic damage and other debuffs, but the game never shows it, you can only see some of these debuffs by entering the status screen after equipping said armor.
 
I was going at a steady rate, but eventually you hit a difficulty spike. Even though you are using the most damaging weapons you can at that point (unless you do the Toad minigame), you just don't do any damage. So I am at a point where enemies can't attack me because my defense/evasion is too high, but I don't have damage enough to kill them.
Spells help, but MP is rather limited, there is only one MP recover item that costs way too much and recovers way too little (also the recover amount is random).
 
The extra story mode suffers from more problems because you need to get the equipment from defeating enemies, since the only shop has starting stuff. Eventually I reached the final boss, but again I could barely damage him.
After a few minutes of spamming spells and sometimes healing, because the boss would remove half of my characters HP when it hit, I finally finished it.
And got a shitty ending.

Pseudiom is quickly becoming my favorite channel on Youtube.  His schtick is to take some random topic and go into way too much detail on side material, but it's always an interesting listen.  I found out about through his Blue Oyster Cult videos, wondering things like "what was up with those early album covers anyway?"
 
 
From there I saw that he had many Jorge Luis Borges videos, another area of interest of mine.  For example, on the Library of Babel which we've discussed here:
 
 
 
There's a variety of other topics, like historical tidbits, weird internet shit, many dives into the influences for various artists and albums, a sprinkling of paranormal topics, etc.  He pretty clearly just talks about whatever the hell he wants to talk about, but that's fine by me.
 
But today this video dropped which is a topic I had long wondered about but forgot about: Where did those cool images in the Outlaw Star EDs come from?  (Especially considering that their connection to the show is very tenuous unless they have something to do with the civilization that created the Galactic Leyline):
 
 
At this point he's one of those guys on the internet, like Ross or Doitsuken, who is so on my wavelength that I sometimes feel like my mind is being scoured for the topics discussed.

A professor in a class was really grasping for an example when talking about social media networking effects and started going down the "so everyone who's seen X raise your hand" and I totally held up the class for like five minutes because I just didn't at all. They were apparently trying to find an example everyone had seen
 
After the first few times I had to stop myself from laughing. You'd think he'd have given up or just ignored me once it was clear I was just not on the same wavelength

People also just need to curate where they visit better. I typically stay in higher quality discords and follow not a lot of people on twitter and I can avoid 90% of the boolshit.
 
But I still see that kind of stuff elsewhere or it can slip through the cracks on some discords I'm obligated to stay in, but I just don't bother most the time with that kinda stuff.

just gonna keep posting these here because yall are the only ones I know who might appreciate these gems

Well Windows 98 STILL doesn't recognize the disc as a data disc, but since it can handle filenames longer than 8 characters it recognizes the custom iso I made with all the files.  So it's now installed!
 
Even starting up the game is kind of sketchy as it says "PLEASE INSERT ED HUNTER DISC 2" even though the install disc is labeled CD 2 (from the 3 CD set) and you actually need to put int the third disc.
 
Click okay and get this beautiful logo plus a voiceover saying "Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number."  Not a bad start.
 

 
The game constantly plays various Iron Maiden tracks. The Number of the Beast plays over the menu.  Apparently you can choose from any of the 20 tracks on the album for any of the stages, though it defaults to Phantom of the Opera for the first stage.  The musical quality is surprisingly good; I was expecting it to be bit crushed to hell (especially since I have run multimedia programs on Windows 3.1 that did that) but it sounds fine. Not quite CD quality, but fine.  Sometimes there was skipping during transitions, but this is probably due to me dropping my virtual CPU speed to the minimum requirements for the game to make sure that Windows 98 ran correctly.
 
The game itself is a rail shooter.  We're theoretically playing as Eddie, or "Ed Hunter: Private Eye"
 

 
We've been given a note to help someone out, and then its off to the streets to kill waves of punks:
 

 
(Incidentally I thought that "5th nut" was some sort of bizarre game mechanic, but just means that the 5th score on the high score list is to someone who put in the initials NUT.)
 
And that's pretty much it. Mow down waves of enemies like any other rail shooter, then the scene transitions, and repeat.
 
The connection to Iron Maiden, beyond playing as Eddie, comes from the music blaring in the background, Iron Maiden posters being present in many locations and some of the locations/enemies being inspired by album art.  For example I'm sure that we go to an asylum and meet this guy because of the Piece of Mind cover:
 

 
Was kind of hoping that there'd be some adventure game elements or a variety of game styles, not just rail shooter gameplay, but it does seem to just be a rail shooter.  That being said, it's pretty competent for what it is.  It's hard to explain without a video, but the view often quickly pans from place to place and moves the enemies appropriately, even though they are all just sprites and none of this is actually 3D.  They did also include some variety with multiple route choices and so on.
 
Final thoughts:
 
I wasn't expecting much, but I probably will go back to play this from time to time. If I had purchased this in 1999 when it came out, I would be pretty psyched.  (Well, assuming that I could get it to install at all, which is doubtful considering I had to use a workaround that wouldn't have been possible in Windows 95/98.)  From what I understand this collection was largely marketed and priced as a music compilation first and foremost.  You do get 20 solid Iron Maiden tracks even without the game. So the game is more of a bonus than anything.  There was lots of that kind of stuff in the 90's and a lot of it was of questionable quality (for example, see LGR's videos on the "Hot Wheels Computer Cars" programs that came with certain hot wheels toys.)  So the fact that this is a competent game AT ALL is pretty cool. Speaking of LGR, I feel like I have a good understanding of the pain the likes of him, Ross and Mandalore go through.  I'm pretty sure I've went through the exact sort of troubleshooting hell that Ross has bitched about in specific videos.  I would say that I am on the edge of becoming one of those channels, but realistically half of what makes that stuff hard is the video editing and I have NO desire to go through video editing hell on top of game compatibility hell.

But, erm... Look guys, look! One of my greatest achievements! Pizza Tower on the Steam Store! Hahahaha!
 

I HAVE BEEN BLESSED WITH VISIONS! MY MIND KEEPS SHITTING WEIRD FORMS AND DESIGNS! A HUNDRED OCS SHALL BE DRAWN! (Buncho sketches from near sleep brain blast)
 
 
 
 
 
 

Had a dream while napping with this OC, but the art style was different. Decided to give it a go and I quite liked it.
 

Over the last couple of days I've been having some mysterious pains in my upper back. (Yeah I know, old man Gyoku.  But this kind of stuff starts happening in your mid to late twenties so most of you are going to have to start dealing with this soon if it hasn't happened already.)
 
Anyway, I started up Youtube for an unrelated reason and one of the top recommendations was for stretches to help with this exact sort of back issue, and they seem to work.  The natural question was, why was that the top recommendation.
 
The default assumption these days is that it was due to data mining.  But in this case I can't see how it would be possible.  This is the first time I've mentioned my back pain online, and I haven't done any searches on the matter since I've been using stretches I already knew before the video was recommended.  The youtube recommendation happened on a clean browser on a computer I don't usually use, and one that I can be sure was never in the same room with me when I talked about back pain, so no microphone harvesting.  I have talked about this on the phone, but only on a flip phone that has no internet capabilities ('cause I intentionally broke them).  So the only conceivable way that this could have been harvested is if Google already had linked that cell phone to my data profile, and also linked me to the other computer, and monitored all my cell phone conversations and processed that I should get a recommendation on the other computer only.  Is that possible?  I guess, but it seems pretty damned unlikely.
 
The more likely scenario is that lots of people have back problems and so this sort of video gets recommended frequently, so in particular it will get "blind" recommendations (as opposed to the weird weeb and boomer game crap I usually watch) and I just happened to have it show up when I started youtube on a fresh browser this time.  But even so my first thought was "oh shit they spied on my conversations" rather than "what a coincidence!" It made me reflect on how even ten years ago everyone probably would have wrote this off as a coincidence, even if they just had been searching for back stuff on the same browser, whereas now we just accept that we are being spied on so hard that it's impossible to avoid detection.

Over the last couple of days I've been having some mysterious pains in my upper back. (Yeah I know, old man Gyoku.  But this kind of stuff starts happening in your mid to late twenties so most of you are going to have to start dealing with this soon if it hasn't happened already.)
 
Anyway, I started up Youtube for an unrelated reason and one of the top recommendations was for stretches to help with this exact sort of back issue, and they seem to work.  The natural question was, why was that the top recommendation.
 
The default assumption these days is that it was due to data mining.  But in this case I can't see how it would be possible.  This is the first time I've mentioned my back pain online, and I haven't done any searches on the matter since I've been using stretches I already knew before the video was recommended.  The youtube recommendation happened on a clean browser on a computer I don't usually use, and one that I can be sure was never in the same room with me when I talked about back pain, so no microphone harvesting.  I have talked about this on the phone, but only on a flip phone that has no internet capabilities ('cause I intentionally broke them).  So the only conceivable way that this could have been harvested is if Google already had linked that cell phone to my data profile, and also linked me to the other computer, and monitored all my cell phone conversations and processed that I should get a recommendation on the other computer only.  Is that possible?  I guess, but it seems pretty damned unlikely.
 
The more likely scenario is that lots of people have back problems and so this sort of video gets recommended frequently, so in particular it will get "blind" recommendations (as opposed to the weird weeb and boomer game crap I usually watch) and I just happened to have it show up when I started youtube on a fresh browser this time.  But even so my first thought was "oh shit they spied on my conversations" rather than "what a coincidence!" It made me reflect on how even ten years ago everyone probably would have wrote this off as a coincidence, even if they just had been searching for back stuff on the same browser, whereas now we just accept that we are being spied on so hard that it's impossible to avoid detection.

I literally had to sew my laptop. You see, some genius thought that having the whole keyboard be permaglued to several small plastic dots from UNDER the frame to be a good idea.
They never had the thought of "what if the keyboard needs to be replaced?"
There is NO way to remove the keyboard without breaking these. The replacement keyboard gets sunk a bit under the frame.
Gluing it is dangerous since the glue can seep around fuck stuff or even ruin the keys.
So I had to get a sewing kit and sew the keyboard into the frame to keep it at the same level it was before.
 
Fucken hell.

Heavy's face is appropriate: slight look of anticipation, but with a larger part of concern for oncoming disappointment.

I wonder how much of touch screen design is due to the fact that on a touch screen they can remove features and you won't realize that you don't have them, whereas if there are non-functional buttons you'll notice right away.  So they can have "premium software packages" and/or subscription services that unlock features already on your car.  I mean, I know that Tesla does that, but I wonder if putting a focus on touch screens was done to accommodate that or if it's just a happy accident.