Capt. Wolf

One for me, but I’m off today and already enjoying a Mai Tai!

deleted by creator

Who uses Adblock??? They’re a bullshit, sellout company.

You install Ublock Origin instead and add the annoyance and adblock-blocking lists…

There… Now you don’t need to watch ads to watch your ads. Your news and recipe sites no longer have an ad every other sentence. A couple pages still refuse to load because you have an ad blocker. You learn to live without them. Your Google searches have sponsored sites filtered out.

You tell your mother that you can’t read that article and it’s not being represented on any other news platform, and suggest it’s possibly not all that reputable. She tells you she got it from Facebook. You tell her to stop getting all her news from Facebook. You realize maybe social media is a symptom of a sick society too involved in each other’s daily doings. You delete your social media accounts and block the pages.

You decide you want to read that book from the Wikipedia page your friend recommended. You open up Libby to see if your local library has a copy of the book. They don’t, but they have digital copies of several other books by the same author. You make a note to check them out later, as they’re not about the topic you were looking for. You search Google for the book title followed by .epub download and find several sites that have the book your looking for. You put it on your tablet, then put on your shoes, and go out to the park to read your new book. While you’re walking, your coworker texts you to complain that your supervisor fired him for plagiarizing work off ChatGPT again. He doesn’t understand how they could tell.

You get to the park, sit, and enjoy your book for a while.

That’s a bummer, but also not entirely surprising when you consider Half-Life 3…

From what I understand, they basically have a very open work structure. People are free to work on what they want, when they want. They actually are against high workloads and do everything they can to prevent employee burnout.

Source

I can’t say if that extends beyond the development teams to other departments like server management, but everything I’ve ever seen about them says they’re all just in it to have fun, make cool shit now and then, and of course make tons of money. The fact that their sales platform basically just prints money helps support that culture, obviously.

The whole cast is amazing. I had no idea they had so many people from TNG on there until my wife told me last night…

Let’s also not forget Keith David… That man could talk me to sleep any time…

Next update: Well, we never actually removed the feature because it’s already irrevocably engrained in the file system. It can’t be turned off or opted out of because it’ll cause your hard drive to explode. Instead, we’ve buried it so deep that only hackers, malware, the government, and Facebook will be able to make use of it.

From what I’ve seen on their site since is that they’re saying they are now GDPR compliant. And I suppose, since they are still open source, that anyone finding anything seriously malicious would have pointed it out by now. Maybe just a bit of bad press and people jumping to conclusions because “Russia bad.”

I do still plan to check out Tenacity though and see if it’s a better project.

Gonna share this, because I had no idea… I think the last time I updated Audacity was, like, 10 years ago…

Here’s Tenacity, which I’ll be checking out shortly…

There’s a lot of archival video that is just terrible. Digital video compression issues have damaged a lot of old footage that’s gotten shared over the years, especially YouTube’s encoders. They will just straight up murder videos to save bandwidth. There’s also a lot of stuff that just doesn’t look great when it’s being upscaled from magnetic media that’s 240x320 at best.

However, there’s also a lot of stuff that was bad to begin with and just took advantage of things like scanlines and dithering to make up for poor video quality. Take old games for example. There’s a lot of developers who took advantage of CRT TVs to create shading, smoothing, and the illusion of a higher resolution that a console just wasn’t capable of. There’s a lot of contention in the retro gaming community over whether games looked better with scanlines or if they look better now without them.

For example.

Personally, I prefer them without. I like the crisp pixelly edges, but I was also lucky enough to play most of my games on a high quality monitor instead of a TV back then. Then emulators, upscaling, and pixel smoothing became a thing…

Kilts are super comfortable. Nothing rides up and your balls never get pinched. Fucking king George… Ruined it for everyone!

Life is short. Time moves quicker and quicker and you always think you have more… It just occurred to me last month that my mom will turn 70 next year and just how little time I have left with my parents.