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A 1970 Corvette

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  1. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette got a reaction from Gyokuyoutama in TIAM IV: Guydiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Cockmongler   
    Speaking of shitty parts lasting forever, I had my laptop just brick recently. That's basically fine, since I bought it for cheap off of ebay for shits and giggles. In fact I ordered another cheap office surplus laptop to replace it, so no harm really.
     
    The thing is, I was trying to think if I had something that I could use in the interim to watch videos in bed or whatever, so I dug up my old surface RT tablet my brother gave to me ages ago. I knew it was a longshot, but oh man was windows 8.1RT the fucking worst thing ever. Honestly it's really a warning (threat?) of what Microsoft wanted to do before everyone so violently rejected Windows 8 as a whole that they had to put off their plans to make everything the worst and boil the frog rather than flash-fry it.
     
    First of all, it didn't work at all when I retrieved it from the closet because the surface RT tablets did automatic back ups that could not be cleaned by the hard drive cleanup tool, and it literally filled up the entire storage available to the computer to the point where it didn't even have a page file. With 2gb of ram, that meant that apparently the tablet couldn't even restart consistently, because when I tried to do the factory reset from within the OS it would literally just fail and say "for some reason the tablet can't reboot!"
     
    I found out a way to factory reset it using a recovery disk (that DEMANDED you put in the Surface's serial code before you got the files for the tablet, thanks microsoft I'm sure people really wanted to pirate or reverse engineer this trash fire of an OS) and eventually I was able to get the tablet in semi-working order. The issue was... The frontend "app store" for it no longer seems to load at all, so you can't get any new programs (or even updates) because windows 8.1rt can't even run .exe files. It's a weird walled garden OS thing that looks like windows and has a desktop like windows with microsoft office but can't actually run anything that's not from the windows store (which doesn't load up anymore).
     
    But that's not really an issue, I just wanted to watch youtube on it mainly until a real device got in. Except because it's cut off from updates and also just getting a new browser off the internet, the thing only has Internet Explorer 10, which is deprecated and several websites (like youtube) just straight up say "lol no, get a real browser" and slam the door in your face. I even had found some adblocking lists for IE10 so I had something resembling one, even if they were likely well out of date.
     
    Basically, at every turn the device failed to do anything. And that makes sense for nowadays since it's like ten years old, but the thing is, it barely did anything at launch. The only issue that I talked about above that wasn't a thing at launch was the internet explorer being deprecated part.
     
    I want to put up a shrine to this piece of junk. It really feels like an embodiment of everything "tech" companies want to do. It's an underspecced, form-over-function device with a hamstringed OS with no future-proofing built in and no way for a user to fix the problems with it themselves. The best I can say is that the screen is nice and displays color well (but it's an ugly ~720p resolution instead of glorious 1080p).
  2. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette got a reaction from Gyokuyoutama in Uh... hi?   
    Nobody's ever really gone.
  3. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette reacted to Raison d'être in TIAM IV: Guydiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Cockmongler   
    Only the shitty parts last forever.
  4. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette got a reaction from Gyokuyoutama in Uh... hi?   
    Nobody's ever really gone.
  5. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette reacted to TheOnlyGuyEver in Doodles on my mediocre drawing tablet   
    Just two dudes in a cave:

     
    I tried out a new paint-y, lineless style here, and I think it looks pretty good! I felt that drawing without clear lines forced me to understand light and shadow better to convey the shapes of things, so I think I learned a good bit, but it's something I still struggle with so I also got a lotta ways to go.
     
    Bonus worldbuilding no one probably cares about:
     
  6. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette got a reaction from Gyokuyoutama in TIAM IV: Guydiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Cockmongler   
    The little dragon breathing fire over the silhouette really must have thrown everyone off the trail for a while. That's hilarious
  7. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette reacted to Razputin in TIAM: Entertainment Stuff   
    I yearn to be able to slam a pencil hard enough into the back of my eyesocket to forever destroy the neurons that make me aware that Taylor Swift recently broke up with her boyfriend
  8. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette reacted to Raison d'être in The IT thread.   
    I finally got it! Predictably, when I got in Google was having an aneurysm.
     

  9. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette got a reaction from Raison d'être in The IT thread.   
    Fuck. I built my emails on a similar structure and now I think I need to check.
     
    that's the stuff of nightmares, hope you figure it out
  10. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette reacted to Razputin in New Forum Bug List   
    To be fair with your name I wouldn't even be certain I typed it right with black on white text
  11. Upvote
  12. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette got a reaction from Gyokuyoutama in Random Image Thread: Animu Edition   
    None of those are kurisu, non-canon
  13. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette reacted to TheOnlyGuyEver in Game Deals Announcement Thread   
    I would not even play Death Stranding if I was paid.
  14. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette reacted to Gyokuyoutama in What song are you listening to RIGHT now?   
    Human music.
  15. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette got a reaction from Gyokuyoutama in What song are you listening to RIGHT now?   
    the title is correct, this is indeed music
  16. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette reacted to Gyokuyoutama in Pluto is a Planet and Other Societal Observations   
    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.
  17. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette reacted to Gyokuyoutama in TIAM IV: Guydiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Cockmongler   
    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.
  18. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette reacted to Gyokuyoutama in In which we post the randomest shit we find on YouTube.   
    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.
  19. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette reacted to Moby in TF2 general   
    I only take my SFMs with high amounts of non-sensical humor or with some Overwatch porn I found on my twitter feed.
  20. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette reacted to Huff in TF2 general   
    sorry I could probably appreciate the work put into this if I sat down and watched it but all I can think of is that one video about how stupid dramatic tf2 SFMs are
  21. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette got a reaction from Gyokuyoutama in TIAM: Entertainment Stuff   
    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
  22. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette reacted to Rynjin in TIAM IV: Guydiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Cockmongler   
    You know, belated appreciation post but I just want to thank (blame?) Corv for my current Yu-Gi-Oh! addiction, enabled by Master Duel. I started playing that game after not having played YGO since like...2008? I was in middle school anyway. And I immediately tried to get back into it building another Zombie deck, like my old one. It sucked, I tried to build Vendreads, 0/10 would not recommend, no not even with the most recent support.
     
    Anyway, I was a bit dejected and trying to figure out what I could do with my limited resources, unsure if I'd permanently fucked myself pulling for the wrong packs. And suddenly, behold! A Dragonmaid Sheou from my most recent 10 pull, along with House Dragonmaid.
     
    Not really my style, but two URs is hard to argue with and more importantly I had remembered Corv talking about them when they first came out, so my response was "Hey, I know these cards!"; familiar ground is comforting, and gives me an easy starting point.
     
    Anyhoo I built a Dragonmaid deck, it was easy and did a lot of damage, and helped me grind gems easily early on so I could then build other decks (I built Branded Dragonmaids before it was cool), and I now have about 700 hours in Master Duel, am still having a ton of fun.
     
    Thanks Corv!
  23. Upvote
  24. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette reacted to Moby in Where I post some stuff I drew/draw/will draw   
    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)
     
     
     
     
     
     
  25. Upvote
    A 1970 Corvette reacted to Gyokuyoutama in The Thread that Makes you go Hmmm   
    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.
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