At the very least, you lost Arthur's towel and gown back in the Vogon ship.
Posts made by Parody
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RE: TDWTF Plays The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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RE: PBP Paranoia?
Housing has been good to us; we've been in the Downtown Marriott the last few years (the hotel directly connected to a food court outside what's now the board/card/miniatures hall).
Gen Con's gotten really big in the last five years or so, which is straining the close-in hotels. From what I can tell there's no real answer for that; the alternative locations aren't any better and there's only so many hotels that the downtown Indianapolis area can support. I wouldn't mind if attendance shrunk a bit, but that has other drawbacks. :/
Regardless, event registration will continue to be a disaster. You'd think even a small company in Seattle could get a halfway decent IT person or two to design and build their registration system, but apparently not. Instead of working on the registration system, let's write our own forums!
At least they didn't use Discourse.
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RE: PBP Paranoia?
@e4tmyl33t said in PBP Paranoia?:
I'm going to do my damnedest to try to go again next year, funds and personal paranoias be damned.
Hopefully you'll get there; good luck in the housing lottery! I've been going for way too long (18 years?) but it's still a good time every year.
@Weng said in PBP Paranoia?:
@Parody Any open slots? If so, PM me the event code, we are WOEFULLY short on Paranoia (actually, we're woefully short on events in general - the one year we're all on deck for event reg we get basically nothing)
And are you the guy I stole the damned unsharpened-pencils bit from?
It's been full since opening day, sorry. If it's any consolation, I also got hosed in event registration this year. (Their server was handing out 504 errors like candy; by the time I got in the queue I was in the 5000s.)
I don't think I've ever done an unsharpened-pencils bit. Sounds like a Paranoia thing, though. :)
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RE: PBP Paranoia?
@Gurth said in PBP Paranoia?:
@Parody said in PBP Paranoia?:
Gotta love Paranoia! It's much better than those not-fun RPGs!
For the better part of twenty years I’ve been wanting to run a game of HōL but have never actually gotten to doing that yet :(
Sounds like me and Tales from the Floating Vagabond. Also some more serious RPGs, but who cares about those? :)
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RE: Raymond Chen disses StackOverflow
@error said in Raymond Chen disses StackOverflow:
I used to work for an agency where the main sales guy would promise the client anything to close a sale. Before consulting with developers to find out if what he was promising was feasible or even possible, let alone to get an estimate. ...
At one of the places I worked once upon a time our project head insisted on sending one of us to industry shows (often our testing lead) along with the sales folks to rein them in from promising the moon to all and sundry. You can't stop everything, but every bit helps.
This was one of the reasons why it was the best place I ever worked, which is (of course) why they decided to close our office, lay everyone off, and shut down development.
Good times.
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RE: PBP Paranoia?
Gotta love Paranoia! It's much better than those not-fun RPGs!
Paranoia has been my favorite RPG/world for a long time, despite only really being suited for one-offs. I've been running events off and on at conventions for years now and will be running one at Gen Con next week.
You might find something useful at the Paranoia portion of my website: MAN Sector. Notably there's one adventure I finally wrote up, a PDF character sheet, and some graphics. Feel free to laugh at its out-of-dateness. :/
Stay alert! Trust no one! Keep your laser handy!
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RE: Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.
@flabdablet said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
@LB_ Windows Update has several failure modes that involve it achieving nothing apart from consuming 100% CPU for hours on end.
Those are neat, but my favorite failure is the reboot loop after it decides to fill your entire boot drive with error logs. That was "fun" to undo. :(
PS: you didn't really need those restore points, did you? I need more room for logs.
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RE: More than five members talking about Twitter
@aliceif said in More than five members talking about Twitter:
Real gamers have that shrink-wrapped copy of whatever game they preordered but hadn't had a chance to play yet on lying on some table, a bunch of games just lying around near their primary console, some loose portable carts on their nightstand and their main games shelf is maybe ordered by console, if even.
Let's see:
- Shrink-wrapped copy of Skyward Sword just lying around, check.
- Games lying around near my primary console...hmm...well, I have piles near the PC and the TV, so that should work. Check.
- Portable carts on the nightstand? I've got them scattered around other places.... My phone charges on the nightstand at night, though. Close enough.
- Main games shelf is still ordered by console since nobody's touched it in a while. Check!
I'm not sure what this proves as most of my video gaming the last few years has been on Windows machines, but yay! Real Gamer! Or at least really close! :/
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RE: More than five members talking about Twitter
@Gurth said in More than five members talking about Twitter:
I used to have a Spectrum with a DISCiPLE back in the day. I remember one time, one of my school friends who had a C64 wanted to walk away to do something else while it loaded a game we wanted to play, but was amazed that the game was up and running before he had even gotten out of the room.
Cool stuff. It's really too bad that Commodore messed up the disk performance on the 64+1541 by wanting to keep backwards compatibility (and failing at that too). Also too bad I didn't even have a Fast Load cart in the early 80s. Once I had things like a RAMLink it was much better, but by then we also had a Tandy with a hardcard. (30 MB hard drive on an expansion card! So cool!) :)
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RE: More than five members talking about Twitter
@Tsaukpaetra said in Twitter:
Hey, if you replaced it with an SSD it would be instantaneous!
Most of us use SD card adapters, actually. Not quite instantaneous, but very fast!
Back in the day JiffyDOS was a big help on my machine, along with RAM drives and the 1581.
Before I had those, though, I would check books out from the library to read while waiting for games to load. :-)
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RE: Pants
@blakeyrat Eh, I like Tribute to Pants more. (Hercules Against The Moon Men is one of my favorite episodes. DEEP HURTING!)
Thankfully, there's more than enough pants to go around. :)
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RE: In which I accidentally Windows 10
@Magus Windows 7, actually.
Aero Snap is nice to have even without a Windows key.
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RE: In which I accidentally Windows 10
My roommate's computer decided to
self-destructupdate itself to Windows 10 yesterday. Not surprisingly, he wasn't happy that it did so without an explicit confirmation. And he's not even a computer geek! He just wants to read his email, surf the Web, and play Civ.Well, 2 out of 3 ain't bad.
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RE: In which I accidentally Windows 10
@marczellm said in In which I accidentally Windows 10:
@Parody I trust you used the insider feedback feature to express your dissatisfaction then? So maybe it does not come to the release channel?
I did a while ago, for whatever it's worth. I think I'm 0 for Infinity between my own feedback and the pile of things I've upvoted, so I don't think it's going to change anything. :P
The one I'd really like to see for folks on a tablet is an option to keep the Taskbar on a narrow edge as you change orientation, but 2 upvotes isn't exactly a landslide. (They disabled letting us set it programmatically back in Windows Vista; you can sort of do it by killing Explorer, rewriting settings in the Registry, and restarting Explorer but that's not nice or pretty.)
Sorry, I've got an Insider question notification wanting my attention. Be right back.
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RE: Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work
@boomzilla said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
Good times.
Indeed! :)
@JazzyJosh said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
@Parody COMPUTE!'s Gazette?
I think so; it seems too Commodore-specific for COMPUTE! proper and I wasn't a subscriber to Run.
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RE: Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work
@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
The Commodore 64 did "reserve" memory for BASIC (actually on startup, it merely copied the entire ROM to RAM, which is why your 64k machine started up with only about 38k available), but if your application wanted that memory they could simply write over it. All they had to do was... uh... write over it. There was no memory protection.
Actually, it didn't do that. The ROM was located at $A000, and the bottom of BASIC memory in the default memory map was $0800 (just above the default screen memory) so $0800-$9FFF = your 38911 bytes of RAM for BASIC's programs (stored from the bottom up) and variables (from the top down).
You could copy the ROM to RAM, turn off the ROM, and rewrite BASIC if you wanted, or just turn the ROM off and have everything from $0800 to $CFFF for whatever machine language program you'd written, or all sorts of other fun stuff with the memory mapping. You could even turn off the I/O and use the RAM under that, though it's a pain if you want to interact with the world.
I did enjoy making my own character sets, thanks to an editor program I typed in from a magazine.
Times have changed.
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RE: In which I accidentally Windows 10
@marczellm For folks using Insider Fast ring builds they changed the order a couple updates back.
My preference would be to have it hide in the Notifications Area with the other occasionally useful but usually not icons. As-is, I expect I'll finally just turn it off on my actual devices when the Anniversary build is released to the world. Or maybe not, who knows? ::
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RE: In which I accidentally Windows 10
@accalia said in In which I accidentally Windows 10:
and that one has Office 2016 Professional installed! I ALREADY HAVE OFFICE! WHY WOULD I TRY IT?!
Maybe it's not 365ish enough? :)
In the testing VM I get those notifications quite a bit, but I've been assuming they're just resetting after every Fast ring OS reinstall. The only Office-related application it has is OneNote.
My tablet came with Office 2013 Home and Student and I don't recall being bothered to get more Office. I could have just blanked it out, though.
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RE: In which I accidentally Windows 10
@Tsaukpaetra I wish it was a little smoother just because it takes so long to upgrade the VM, but it works out pretty well once you've got a stable setup.
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RE: In which I accidentally Windows 10
@dcon said in In which I accidentally Windows 10:
@Parody said in In which I accidentally Windows 10:
My favorite recent random unnecessary Windows 10 change is putting the new notifications button where the clock's been since Windows 95
Huh. I'd hadn't noticed that until you mentioned it... But on a touch screen, I like it better - it's easier to hit.
But do you want/need to hit it? :)
A lot of these things Microsoft's been doing, like swapping the clock and the new notifications button, have been pretty minor annoyances. They are, however, more reasons to not move off of Windows 7 on my main machine. XP again indeed.
Over on my convertible tablet (originally on 8, now on the release version of 10) I can do a lot more customizing and thus turn off/override/etc. the things that bug me.
Speaking of upgrading, my tablet's path from 8 to 8.1 to 10 were in-place upgrades and have worked out fine. I should do a clean install to recover the original restore partition's storage space, but overall I'm 1 for 1. I don't plan on doing in-place upgrades with Windows 7 machines, though.
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RE: What Mobile-Games do you guys play / enjoy?
This last week I've been wasting time with Pathfinder Adventures, Obsidian's conversion of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game to Android and iOS.
Pros: it's free to try and if you play it a lot you can eventually get all of the content for free. Overall a good job of converting the physical game, including a couple of interesting additions.
Cons: buggy, enough that you may want to wait a couple weeks for fixes before trying it unless you're a fan of the physical game. No Windows version yet, but one is in the works. (I have a Windows tablet which I like to use for board games, among other junk.)
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RE: In which I accidentally Windows 10
@FrostCat said in In which I accidentally Windows 10:
@Parody said in In which I accidentally Windows 10:
Having it shoved an inch higher
Just how many rows high is your taskbar?
It's on the left, so the entire height of the virtual monitor. When I have it on the bottom, it's one row high.
@RaceProUK said in In which I accidentally Windows 10:
@Parody said in In which I accidentally Windows 10:
Having it shoved an inch higher and stuck in the middle of a bunch of icons makes it harder to spot
Then pin it to the taskbar
It's already on the taskbar, between the mostly unneeded on a desktop Touch Keyboard button and the almost completely unneeded Action Center button. I'd get rid of both normally, but I want them there for testing.
Added: I see nested quotes work well. :P
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RE: In which I accidentally Windows 10
@FrostCat said in In which I accidentally Windows 10:
How often are you clicking on your clock?
Only occasionally to see the calendar, but I look at it quite a bit. Having it shoved an inch higher and stuck in the middle of a bunch of icons makes it harder to spot (or at least it does while I'm adjusting). I'd probably click it more in Windows 10 if I used the Calendar integration but I haven't wanted to set that up in the VM yet.
But hey, I see that Windows Defender wants to scan my computer again. ::sigh::
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RE: In which I accidentally Windows 10
My favorite recent
randomunnecessary Windows 10 change is putting the new notifications button where the clock's been since Windows 95. It sure is important that the place that stores up popup balloons we've all been safely ignoring overrides 20 years of muscle memory.If nothing changes between now and when this gets out of the Fast ring I'll probably just turn the button off, but in my testing VM I leave everything on to know
what we're in for somedaywhat cool changes are coming! :( -
RE: Overwatch Open Beta later this week.
I played some during the open weekend not too long ago; I had some connection problems and didn't have much time to learn how to best play the characters, but it seems OK.
However, I don't have a group to play with nowadays to make sure I have a few non-idiots on my team. Without that or single player I don't see much point in buying it.
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RE: Mechanical keyboards, now available at food trucks
Going back to the initial topic, I brought a video card into work once so I could use a second monitor until my first computer was replaced. (Said video card is now in its intended use in my computer hooked to the TV.)
One of those Dell slightly bendy key and volume control keyboards came with my...second? computer at that job; it soon went into the keyboard pit at work, replaced with a standard layout one. (Said keyboard pit is probably filled with low-travel keyboards now.)
My main keyboard at home is a Model M that came with a PS/2 Model 30 I got for free back in the 90s. Still types wonderfully and I don't have to worry about noise in my home office. I lost the Scroll Lock keycap somewhere along the way, but that's not a big deal. I've looked at getting a more modern mechanical keyboard, but nothing's grabbed me yet for the cost.
The other PC keyboard I've used the most is a Logitech wireless one that's been my workbench and spare gaming keyboard since the late 90s or early 2000s. It's a pretty generic membrane keyboard with Windows keys, but it runs for months on a couple of AAs and is easy to get out of the way when I need to take a computer apart. The mouse that was part of the set died a long time ago, sadly.
I attribute most of my avoidance of RSI typing issues to having learned to type on a Commodore 64 with my hands 3+ inches off the desk.
Food trucks are a non-factor in my eating experience; at least one of the office areas in which I've worked featured the exciting variety of having a Subway and an Arby's in reasonable driving distance. Feel the excitement! :/
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RE: Undefined OOP Techniques
@dkf I wrote one of my first year projects in Commodore 64 BASIC, complete with tractor feed printout and bringing my computer to a classroom to demonstrate.
I got better.
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RE: Undefined OOP Techniques
@dkf Gotta love differences in terminology. In my college/university experiences:
Tutors are people (usually other students) who aren't attached to a specific class, but can help you with homework.
TAs are the students attached to a specific class who can help you with questions about that class. They also often teach labs or other secondary sessions.
Advisors are folks from your major's department who oversee your academic advancement, answer questions about things like which classes to take, and help you with paperwork. You see them if your grades slip. They may recommend you see a counselor.
Counselors are people from the college/university who help you deal with life issues, psychological problems, and such.
Learning Drone 9652342, reporting for class!
As for other stuff: no OOP specific classes. Our intro classes were taught with Scheme; the rest was mostly C with some MATLAB and some projects where you could use whatever. I thought the Operating Systems class that was basically "Intro to fork() and pipe()" was rather misleading, but I guess I should be lucky that any of my classes admitted computers actually existed.
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RE: The Web is Doom...
This would be cool if it meant I could pick up a rocket launcher and blow up some of the worst-designed sites.
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RE: Sign up for Google Play Music so you'll be available on Android (eventually)
@Jaloopa Google only officially added podcast support to its Android app two days ago.
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RE: Sign up for Google Play Music so you'll be available on Android (eventually)
Updates for Google's Android applications and the OS itself are always staggered; one time my trusty Nexus 5 gets it the day they announce something new, another it'll take a week. Or maybe a month.
Why they feel like this is needed is anyone's guess. :\
FWIW, the only thing for which I use
Google Play Musicthe Music section of the Play Store is the occasional free album Google gives away. Podkicker has been my Android podcast manager for a while now. -
RE: I cannot wait until movie theaters go out of business...
While there are a couple of nice AMCs (with a low number of recliner type seats) in our area, I usually go to the Regal nearby because it's much cheaper and mostly empty on Tuesdays. (Not that I go very often nowadays.)
We probably have some Alamo Drafthouse-style theatres somewhere in the metro, but I don't know of any. They sound nice, though. :)
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RE: Blakeyrat pointing out NodeBB problems
@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat pointing out NodeBB problems:
I like the M.U.L.E.
Pretty cool. M.U.L.E. was one of my favorite games from the Commodore era. Good times.
What was that? Avatars? Yeah, I'm glad to have Tails' other frame back, even if it doesn't get to stay long. I don't turn off animated graphics completely, but I do block ones that are too annoying.
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RE: Cartman sucks at hardware
@cartman82 said in Cartman sucks at hardware:
Every build is annoying when you're not really into tinkering with hardware.
Or if that hardware is new to you. I'd done a lot of machine builds over the years, but that slowed down quite a bit because we weren't having friends over to play LAN games anymore. Where before we had some six computers in frequent use, now we only had two and I wasn't refreshing them that often. Also I only used stock coolers for most of the builds, but I bought a nicer one for my personal machine. Thus this was my first build with a cooler that didn't just clip onto the CPU socket.
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RE: Cartman sucks at hardware
@blakeyrat I had that sort of problem when I put together my current main computer. Along with figuring out the random metal bits I didn't notice my case's access hole for the back side of the CPU cooler wasn't in the right place for my motherboard, so I had to take it back out and do the whole mess on the table. It took three tries before I got the thing together and I'm lucky I didn't break something along the way.
Thankfully the computer's been running smoothly ever since so it all worked out in the end, but it was a very annoying build.
Oh, and the CPU fan header is close to the CPU on that motherboard, so that wasn't an issue. IIRC, the only wiring issue I had was the case's audio wire not being long enough to reach the header near the back of the motherboard with the cards installed, so the front headphone jack doesn't work.
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RE: MongoDB? What's that, some kind of fruit? Give me a real database!
@dse said in MongoDB? What's that, some kind of fruit? Give me a real database!:
and why is it not fixed til now!
Like many Windows quirks, it's a backwards-compatibility issue. This one goes back to DOS and is fairly limited if the discussion is to be believed. (I wouldn't know; this quirk was new to me.)
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RE: WTF was that?!
@TimeBandit said in WTF was that?!:
@Vaire lets drop all this "forum" bullshit and switch to a git repos.
need to create a new discussion ? git add "some-filename-as-title"
want to add a comment ? add it to the file and commit.Wasn't this how Google Wave started?
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RE: Ranting about all the WTF I just experience.
@AyGeePlus said in Ranting about all the WTF I just experience.:
I'd assume dot product.
Wouldn't that be
"some string"."another string"
? (Extra fun in PHP! ) -
RE: Need a "cool" tech-related presentation topic
Do you do any tech stuff in your spare time? Talk about that.
When I was taking classes and also the webmaster (== main IT guy) for our local gaming convention, I did a paper/presentation combo about the convention's registration system and their effort to move to an online version. My knowledge of the convention and systems involved let me tell a story I knew well and do most of the presentation talking on the fly, while my collection of pictures and access to relevant screenshots meant I had good material for the slides and paper.
Unfortunately, none of this side work helped implement a registration system (institutional inertia for the ) but at least I got a good grade out of it. :)
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RE: Ranting about all the WTF I just experience.
@HardwareGeek said in Ranting about all the WTF I just experience.:
My brain interpreted your statement as meaning that Ruby supported multiplying a string by another string (which also works in other languages if the strings look like numbers) —
"some string" * "another string"
— and quite logically refused to derive any meaningful result from that operation.Hmm...my algebra tells me it'd be
"someanother somestring stringanother stringstring"
, or some variant thereof. (String concatenation fails commutation, after all.) -
RE: Andy installer (Android emulator)
@Tsaukpaetra said in Andy installer (Android emulator):
Maybe you need a smaller system partition then? I'm doing pretty well on a 50 GB slice of pie
Reminds me that my main machine's boot SSD needs some cleaning; it was a bit low on space before I had two copies of Windows 10's install junk on it. ::sigh::
One of the best installer/updaters I've ever used was the one for the defunct MMO Star Wars Galaxies. If there wasn't enough space to install an update or expansion, it'd tell you and ask if you wanted to pick a new install location, suggesting a location that would have enough space if you had one. Once you approved a location it'd copy your install, delete the old one, and continue on with whatever it had been trying to do.
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RE: :middle_finger: Fuck you Opera as hard as your new UI fucks my eyes
Agreed, it should match my chosen Windows UI colour.
They have a checkbox for that in Settings. Not sure why they felt it was needed, but whatever. -
RE: :middle_finger: Fuck you Opera as hard as your new UI fucks my eyes
So... OS specific styling?
Seemingly; Opera 36 on Windows 7 looks much the same as your Debian screenshot.Now I just have to figure out why it's crashing when I try to open Settings. ::sigh::
Added: No luck on the crash, but (for now) you can get a bit of the old look back by disabling opera://flags/#windows-10-skin . I bet that one disappears quickly.
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RE: Yahoo's Engineers Move to Coding Without a Net
Ye find yeself in yon dungeon. Ye see a SCROLL. Behind ye scroll is a FLASK. Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH and DENNIS.
> BUILD YE FLASK
I don't know how to BUILD YE FLASK!
(And you just sit there and imagine why on Earth you can't build the flask, since there's certainly no way the compiler's going to tell you.)
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RE: How is it possible to get scrollbar so wrong!?
@Gurth said:
option-click
?
Shift-click on Windows.@Gurth said:
operate the scroll wheel to get there
I introduce you to free-scroll mouse wheels. Your life is now better.
Shift-click works whether or not you have one. :: -
RE: Simulator games are getting ridiculous now
You'd think so, right? But no, the "Skittles are rare in the land" and serve as a limiter on which combinations of spells you can have equipped at one time.
I never had A Boy and His Blob as a kid, but it looks like a game I would have loved. (It's in my pile of games to play "someday", just like all that stuff I've bought from Steam sales.)
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RE: Simulator games are getting ridiculous now
###SimSkittles - Puke the Rainbow!
Nah, stick to third-person action-adventure:
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RE: More stupid Git errors THIS TIME IN FIRST-PERSON!
But git is like being handed a transmission, and engine and some wheels and being told: "Hey, here you go, you can build exactly the vehicle you need for your trip—it's not for us to dictate how you make your journey."
I thought that was ClearCase. Well, except that instead of giving you the parts, it's a lease based on the number of people who ever see the resulting vehicle. (Which is not entirely unlike Wild Wacky Action Bike.)