John Caveson

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.

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

I have achieved the CEO Grindset.

Happy New Year subspuffers! I wish y'all a nice 2024

Brooooo! This looks almost exactly like mine. Though mine is is a 9-incher, while that's more like ~14 inches. It's also an Emerson brand, not Magnavox.
 
Aside from that, however, everything looks the same:
 
- Same color
- The buttons look all the same
- The RCA port is in the same position, same goes for the headphone port and infrared sensor
- Built-in DVD player
- Same looking speakers
 
I randomly found it my dad's closest one day, still in perfect condition. He said I could have it. I still have fond memories of taking that thing with us up to Lake Tahoe and watch movies every night before bed. In fact, it was at Tahoe where we used the included antenna and watched the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. I also remember playing my Gamecube and watching my brother play the first Gears of War when we first got the 360. So, upon re-discovering this thing, I've been kind of on a nostalgia trip. It's just so eerie you stumbled upon one that looks so similar to mine. It's kinda spooking me a bit.

I recently picked up a pretty little CRT for cheap. Thing's in great shape and had a good owner. So I took it upon myself to replay OOT. This was my 3rd time playing it, though my 1st time in about 15 years. You know that bell curve meme? Yeah, that's basically how I feel about the game. Throughout life you go from "OOT IS ONE OF THE GREATEST GAMES EVER!" to "OOT is overrated!" to "OOT is one of the greatest games ever.
 
There's just so much to find in this game. This was my 3rd playthrough and I was still finding secrets and areas I had literally never seen before -- partly because since then I had gotten a rumble pak, which the Stone of Agony utilizes to indicate nearby hidden grottoes. Some of these grottoes you literally will not find without it because there's no way you'd know they were there otherwise, and honestly I kind of like that, hidden secrets that are where you'd least expect them, in the middle of nowhere, right under your feet. There's also a whole secret multi-room segment of the Fire Temple I discovered, which I had never seen before in my life and most other people probably haven't either.
 
OOT just has so much shit in it. The good type. Shit that exists purely for you to discover, for the joy and sake of discovering; items that exist purely because they are fun and cool. There's an entire sidequest you can do where you unlock a bunch of masks that you can wear for neat extra dialogue, the grand prize of which being a mask that lets you talk to Gossip Stones, revealing hidden secrets and world lore to you -- and you even get a few bonus masks for completing it. You can get mobile explosive Bombchus to use, you can acquire optional spells for combat or utility, you can get hidden elemental arrows, you can dive deeper with a Golden Scale, you can buy a fuckhuge sword that breaks, you can acquire a PERMANENT version of said fuckhuge sword -- even one of the very first items you get, Deku Nuts, are optional for you to use. Every consumable item in the game even has two capacity upgrades for you to find as well, some of which I had never discovered until this playthrough. As you ever going to need that many Deku Sticks? No, but it's cool that you can now! I feel like this is something that's seriously lacking later games -- just cool, entirely optional, unique items for you to find. Instead, so many items in later installments are just a lock for a key, and have no use or reason outside of that one specific thing.
 
OOT-specific section ends here, for additional dialogue concerning the series as a whole, click below:
 
TL;DR: OOT is one of the greatest games ever it's true.

Well, I don't post much here now, but turns out this year, two of my remaining uncles got diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, one passed already and one is in pretty bad shape, gonna go visit him while I still can.
 
moral of the story, don't smoke, esp a pack or more a day.

I was looking around my emails since I've been getting massive amounts of spam these days, and I found an email from December 2010.
 
It was the original pics of the DemoPan thread.
 
 
 

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2023/08/17/xbox-360-store-will-close-july-2024/
 
God, I hate when I'm right. The final countdown is on boys, get 'em while you still can. As for me, I've pretty much gotten whatever was on my radar, aside from some Minecraft DLC and OG Xbox games that don't license transfer if you get them from the modern store. That being said, I will still keep an eye out for anything that might catch my interest from now until the closure. I'll try to prioritize non-BC games.

I was digging the depths of my hard drive and I just want to dump some old TF2 media here.
 
It's not the Black Box we got, but has ideas later used for the Beggar's Bazooka.
 
BUT THERE IS ONE THEY FEAR
 
Gang Garrison Engineer
 
The Holy Canteen
 
Part of a Fake Engineer update. Never got a nailgun, but the Cloak draining and EMP ideas were used in the Pompson and Short Circuit.
 
How tob eat spycicle
 
Pirate Fortress, Someone made models for them, don't know if they were ever released.
 
Before Collector's quality weapons, there was Science Achieved.
 
What if we could burn like... way more stuff?
 
I don't know if this was ever released as a mod.
 
Behold this ancient crossword puzzle.
 

Fahrenheit: 0 = really cold, but commonly experienced, temperature.  100 = really hot, but commonly experienced, temperature.
 
Celsius: 0 = kind of cold but it gets colder than this in most places. 100 = お前はもう死んでいる (i.e. you ded.)
 
And yet Celsius apologists will defend their system on the basis of finding it easier to remember the temperature that water boils at, as if you wouldn't be able to tell if water was boiling without putting a thermometer in it.

Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blink 182, The Offspring, and trance music (although that blends into early 2000s). So basically a 90s flavor of pop-punk with Gen X angst (as opposed to 2000s pop punk which is millennial, post 9/11 angst).

Ho-lee shit. What a labor of love. They even got the original voiceactors.

Decided to watch some cartoons. Man, how far these channels have fallen.
 
There are like 10 cartoon channels, 6 of them are for babies/toddlers. Disney is either live action sitcons or Loud House. Nickelodeon is either Spongebob, Patrick, Spongebob Babies or live action sitcom.
 
Cartoon Network is a shadow of its former self, I looked at the channel schedule and it was 3 hours of Teen Titans GO, followed by Bare Bears Babies, Total Drama Babies, Gumball and some shitty obligatory by law brazillian cartoons, followed by another 3 hours of Teen Titans Go. ITS ALL THEY SHOW, THE ENTIRE SCHEDULE WAS 70% TEEN TITANS GO. THIS SERIES HAS 400 EPISODES WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK
 
Dreamworks has an entire channel to "low quality shows of our animated movies".
 
The only channel worth watching is Tooncast because it only runs old cartoons (early 2000s ones), shame that the Boomerang channel that used to show really old cartoons changed into live action sitcoms then was nuked.
 
Its times like these that I really miss the old schedule, weird cartoons played early in the morning (I remember some show about Tripplets and a witch), at the start of the afternoon they started with shows like Shaolin Showdown, Toonami started at 17:00 with Pokemon, followed by Dragon Ball, Inuyasha and Zatch Bell. Followed by Cartoon Cartoons from 19:00 to 22:00, having a mix of Dexter, Cow and Chicken, I Am Weasel, Johnny Bravo, Megas XLR, Time Squad, Samurai Jack, Powerpuff Girls, Ed, Edd n Eddy, and several others. Then after that, it was Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck Show for one hour, ending with the Tex Avery Show.
Adult Swim wasn't from my time, but I remember stuff like Evangelion and other animes playing after midnight.
 
Was the Locomotion channel available in other countries? I remember it was mostly adult anime, I still remember stuff like Agent Aika, Burn Up Excess and Saber Marionette from there.

Don't tell me you didn't cry when Scout's mom turned into the sun and said "Ya done did good, kid."

A fucking FEATURE-LENGTH FILM

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)
 
 
 
 
 
 

It's time.

For those of you who said that going back and emulating Windows 3.1 was too retro to be worthwhile, I have a new project:
 

 
This following image is literally true. Well, I have occassionally used Windows 95 on random public computers but I largely skipped from Win 3.1 to Win 98 on real computers.
 

 
The reason I'm going to Windows 95 is two fold: first, I found better support articles for setup (particular this one), second because some of the local thrift stores recently had someone dump a bunch of Win95 games and I think it'd be neat to get them running on the appropriate OS.
 

 
And we're in! The fact that this comes with a trial for AOL, AT&T WorldNet, CompuServe and Prodigy is more indicative of the time period than anything.  I've only had limited experience with Compuserve (on a relative's computer) and I think I saw Prodigy running once but otherwise my experience is basically nil.  For most people the fact that these services used to be the gateway to the internet is basically unknown (beyond AOL.)  Probably more people know about Gopher than Prodigy.
 
EDIT: After half an hour of ripping a disc image and fucking around with the drivers, I got this Mastermind game running, ultimately from the original disc:
 

 
I was worried when I saw it was a .cue file, meaning that it used redbook technology to play songs from the disc itself rather than as audio files, but the sounds are working fine too.
 
And of course the last step is always to put a modern background image.  This was a bit more annoying.  Unlike DOS-Box, PCEm doesn't use one of your folders as the "virtual hardrive" but rather a big img file.  So you can't just copy the images you want to use into the computer directly.  I ended up making a fake iso image full of images and then had that loaded into the virtual CD rom drive.  Only .bmp is allowed for a wallpaper.  I have things in "true color" (24 bit) but you can still see some color loss from how things are saved now days.  Still a hell of a lot better than it would be if I had not installed the S3 drivers and left everything in 16 color mode.
 

 
EDIT: Wait, I'm dumb. The reason for the low color depth on that background is because it's an image I previously reduced to 256 colors for compatibility with windows 3.1.  Here's what it looks in the proper 24-bit color depth:

When I was a wee lad I thought that there really wasn't any difference between "normies" (not that I called them that then) and people like me.  Nothing beyond a difference in hobbies.  I.e. I liked weird sci-fi stuff, RPGs, superheroes, etc. and normal people did not and it was only this difference in hobbies that made us seem different.
 
Now that every historically "nerd" hobby has been mainstreamed, I can be certain that no, the normies are intrinsically different.  What's more, it's also clear in retrospect that there were normies in nerd hobbies even back then, but not in large enough numbers to ruin them.
 
This kind of ties into the missing SPUF thing too, since SPUF's obsolesce made it anti-normie, which can never be achieved with Discussions.

So I'm not sure I count as a new user, but I made this account when spuf died and then never used it. Just got nostalgic about old spuf and remembered this existed so decided to come give it a shot. Not sure who all is here these days and who might remember me but hello whoever is still around!

This is why we in the biz call 'em Nintoddlers (I prefer Nintenyearold, personally).
 

Necromancy powers activate! Looks like I need to eat a hat now.
 
Anyways, the MCC is awesome now. The Steam Workshop update is probably the single greatest thing 343i has ever done for the franchise. Of course, that bar was never particularly high, but still, when you get something like THIS on the workshop....
 
....then MCC will become the next Garry's mod, because this is epic. Especially for Steam Deck users who are forced to use the anti-cheat disabled version. All I really want now is a version of the Custom Games Browser that can play modded servers with AC disabled. I might even need the AC to work on Proton anymore if that's the case.
 
Seriously, whoever is leading the MCC team is single-handedly keeping the franchise alive, cuz Infinite sure shit ain't.
 

Necromancy powers activate! Looks like I need to eat a hat now.
 
Anyways, the MCC is awesome now. The Steam Workshop update is probably the single greatest thing 343i has ever done for the franchise. Of course, that bar was never particularly high, but still, when you get something like THIS on the workshop....
 
....then MCC will become the next Garry's mod, because this is epic. Especially for Steam Deck users who are forced to use the anti-cheat disabled version. All I really want now is a version of the Custom Games Browser that can play modded servers with AC disabled. I might even need the AC to work on Proton anymore if that's the case.
 
Seriously, whoever is leading the MCC team is single-handedly keeping the franchise alive, cuz Infinite sure shit ain't.