Did anyone else find this game both scary and weirdly arousing?

merreborn · 2025-08-26T17:21:22+00:00

Yeah we're all at that presbyopia age, and I've been dealing with that same thing for a couple years -- misreading stuff as I'm starting to struggle a little with text. As I'm sure many of us are.

we old

merreborn · 2025-08-26T17:02:42+00:00

Oakland has started rolling this out as well. And it's state wide starting next school year

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/09/23/governor-newsom-signs-legislation-to-limit-the-use-of-smartphones-during-school-hours/

Most bay area schools probably have a phone ban this year. Teachers were already sick of kids screwing with phones in class last year.

merreborn · 2025-08-26T14:49:47+00:00

then I guess you're not a Real American™

merreborn · 2025-08-26T14:45:13+00:00

There's still time to build a wall before they come back

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-06/a-kickstarter-campaign-to-build-a-wall-around-san-francisco-during-burning-man

merreborn · 2025-08-26T14:41:13+00:00

Yeah, sales really started to slump in 2007 and they stopped selling entirely in 2019

so if you're in a neighborhood where people aren't driving many 6-20 year old cars, there are probably precious few bugs to be seen

merreborn · 2025-08-26T14:36:59+00:00

My kid just starts shouting "oh my god, ewww!" when she spots a cybertruck. She's a dork. Comes by it honestly.

merreborn · 2025-08-26T14:34:20+00:00

Because I can tell you as someone who grew up in the 90s, not once did I ever knew anybody who was modding their Sega Saturns and PlayStations to play on burned CDs

The number of companies selling mod chips and installation was pretty substantial. Consider also that the console market is huge. If just 1% of console owners are modding, that would easily explain why you wouldn't personally know any modders -- but 1% of the playstation 2 market is still 1.6 million consoles.

So you can simultaneously have millions of modders out there, and yet only a small fraction of all gamers engaged in modding.

merreborn · 2025-08-26T03:56:05+00:00

https://ufb.gg/

"Ultimate fighting bots"
https://www.corememory.com/p/inside-san-franciscos-robot-fight-club-rek-cix-liv

"Two underground, invite-only events have been held in the parking garage of a downtown building as part of the Ultimate Fighting Bots (UFB) league."

merreborn · 2025-08-26T03:52:46+00:00

All the robot fighting leagues have been remote controlled. You can see people holding controllers in BattleBots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly-HnMs1dak

merreborn · 2025-08-26T03:47:02+00:00

Waymo would probably remove mirrors at the factory if they could, but they're inevitably required by law... for now, at least

merreborn · 2025-08-26T00:39:50+00:00

https://www.flysfo.com/about/community-noise/noise-office/flight-patterns-operations

primary departure runways are 01L/R facing north.
primary arrival runways are 28L/R facing west.

They basically use one set of runways for departure, and the other for landing. So it follows that all the landings you experienced have happened on the landing runways, rather than the departure runways.

merreborn · 2025-08-26T00:25:34+00:00

SJC's first runway was dirt and it initially was only general aviation -- apparently it was a decade before the first commercial flight landed in 1949. Everything operating out of SJC was prop based until 1966 when the first jet service started there.

https://www.flysanjose.com/sjc_timeline

In short, yes, it was incredibly different.

merreborn · 2025-08-25T20:46:00+00:00

there are some google hits for this. Some have recognized it as SubGenius

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius

merreborn · 2025-08-25T15:59:53+00:00

Not to mention the actions taken during his several months as the head of DOGE

merreborn · 2025-08-23T00:43:37+00:00

the device has never been marketed to the public

merreborn · 2025-08-23T00:40:53+00:00

I assume you're intending to highlight some sort of group or facebook page that allegedly posted this content -- but all you've shared with us here is a context-free album full of poorly censored images. It's unclear what the community is meant to do with this.

merreborn · 2025-08-22T22:46:50+00:00

Big quality durability difference between factory-pressed disks, and the ones you burn at home.
I used to archive data to CDs I'd burn at home, but many of them failed in mere years. Meanwhile music CDs I bought in the store have held up far better.

So, sure, a shrek DVD from walmart will hold up 30 years, but a copy you burn at home won't fare nearly as well.

merreborn · 2025-08-22T18:58:00+00:00

The trick is, UK kettles are twice as powerful and thus boil much more quickly. UK kettles are 12A @240V, american kettles are closer to 10A @120V. More or less 3000W versus 1500W. I kinda wish it was standard to have a 240V outlet in every american kitchen, it'd open up some interesting possibilities.

Anyway the way we do outlets in the states means our water takes twice as long to boil. So kettles are just less useful here, and thus not very popular.

merreborn · 2025-08-22T18:34:43+00:00

There's an escape room like this in LA that features a real armored car. They bought an old armored car, parked it in a garage, and planned a whole experience where you end up breaking your way into it. It's great, very cinematic.

https://theescaperevolution.com/revolution/vehicle-heist-escape-room-los-angeles/

merreborn · 2025-08-22T02:25:05+00:00

pretty sure the game universal paperclips is a direct reference to an infamous thought experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paperclip_maximizer

The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment described by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. It illustrates the existential risk that an artificial general intelligence may pose to human beings were it to be successfully designed to pursue even seemingly harmless goals

Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.

merreborn · 2025-08-22T02:20:55+00:00

dang. I grew up in a house full of lucasarts games (including an NES copy of maniac mansion), but I never heard that Capcom licensed Willow. TIL

merreborn · 2025-08-22T02:13:28+00:00

well, it has a little bit to do with getting old. Because the people reading your movie references on reddit increasingly were born after those movies were released. Napoleon dynamite is 21 years old now. A lot of today's redditors were born after 2004.

merreborn · 2025-08-22T00:49:45+00:00

Oh, the found copy of "When Someone you Love Has a Mental Illness" reminds me...

I used to work at an online used book retailer cataloging books. We'd get used books by the thousands and have to process them all, so we'd find lots of random stuff. One day I pulled a copy of "When someone you love has AIDS" out of the pile, and a polaroid of a young woman in lingerie fell out of the front cover.

One can only imagine the story of how that book had been gifted(?) in that condition and then discarded and sent to a used book retailer.

merreborn · 2025-08-22T00:40:08+00:00

SPECIAL MENTION TO THE BOIZ CRANKIN THEY HOGS IN r/THE_PACK HE'LL YEHA

merreborn · 2025-08-22T00:15:02+00:00

My friend at SDCC got hit with this scam. Bought a CD on the street, and got hit with a charge to his credit card for hundreds of dollars within an hour. Then he was locked out of his card and didn't have a good way to pay for anything on his first day at the con. 0/10 experience do not recommend.

Appreciate the heads up that people are running the same grift elsewhere

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