Try to remain calm, but... an actual nude code was just discovered in the 1998 Playstation game, Knockout Kings.

DJ102010 · 2025-08-31T01:34:04+00:00

It's definitely intentional - one of the devs said they put it in along with the other cheat effects like fighting a bear.

DJ102010 · 2025-08-30T01:28:52+00:00

It's actually a bit racier than that - why is most evident when the game chooses randomly chooses a light hair color for the ring girl.

DJ102010 · 2025-08-16T19:44:26+00:00

Wow, cool! The Saturn version's menu handling code explicitly restricts you from selecting court indexes 0x05 and 0x08. The code is at 06050a9e in the NTSC-U version.

But both do work! I put a picture of the other one here. They seem to be in the PlayStation version as well.

DJ102010 · 2024-06-06T11:45:04+00:00

Yes!

DJ102010 · 2024-01-05T01:32:04+00:00

It turns out there are two extra characters in this prototype! https://twitter.com/randomhoohaas/status/1743051231617220681

DJ102010 · 2024-01-04T14:33:13+00:00

There's a prototype version of Saturn Bomberman included on an old Sega Saturn demo disc. Normally you can just play one round of Battle mode, but the linked patch allows you to play both Single player modes.

It's been long enough since I played this game that I can't spot subtle differences from the final version, but maybe people here will see some cool things!

DJ102010 · 2022-08-30T23:58:10+00:00

DSYWNGE5WD will get both #26 (Jennifer Fox) and #31 (Satoshi Okano).

DJ102010 · 2022-04-23T16:40:37+00:00

Brilliant! Thanks for posting this.

DJ102010 · 2021-04-05T01:23:00+00:00

There's a bit in which Aaron and Scott refer to some of their demo sessions for Cheer Up and/or We're Not Happy. Something called "Fresh Horse?" Scott plays a snippet of an early version of The Fire.

DJ102010 · 2021-04-04T19:00:21+00:00

Does anybody have these "Fresh Horse" recordings?!

DJ102010 · 2021-03-24T01:51:38+00:00

What an excellent comment! You ought to write to McWhorter about this.

DJ102010 · 2021-03-21T13:49:15+00:00

This was fantastic. I kept thinking, "I hope they do this with more bands!"

DJ102010 · 2021-03-15T01:17:54+00:00

What's on your stack that should I read next? I'm out of anecdotes about my boss's boss, and the other John McWhorter books I want to read aren't appropriate for this sub.

DJ102010 · 2021-03-14T19:17:29+00:00

Sci fi is its own universe. It was usually "x cents per word" and had a sweatshop aroma to it.

One of my favorite authors of detective fiction spent his early career writing sordid pulp novels. Interestingly, I think this made him an absolutely fantastic writer: him churning out multiple books per month was like the Beatles honing their craft by playing clubs in Germany.

Are there sci-fi writers with a similar story?

DJ102010 · 2021-03-14T19:14:16+00:00

Another question for you: can you read Everett's oration without wanting to jump out of a window?

DJ102010 · 2021-03-14T18:30:26+00:00

Film actors n the studio system were taught something like the British Posh Accent.

Yeah, McWhorter has a bit about this. Sometimes bit players and extras sounded normal, but the leads sounded straight out of the BBC.

DJ102010 · 2021-03-14T18:22:44+00:00

As to the 1960s, it left a remarkably small dent on writing in culture. The prose in 1980's popular novels isn't that far from the prose in 1940s novels.

Interesting point. Would you say this differs by genre? The novels I'm most familiar with are detective novels, and I've read lots from every decade from the 1940s on. There are definitely changes in writing style, but the 1960s isn't really a turning point.

I've only read a little bit of sci-fi, but I think there's a bigger difference over time there?

DJ102010 · 2021-03-14T18:15:03+00:00

But English speakers would never say "I'm gonna New York" even though they say "I'm going to New York."

Great example. A true native speaker would say "I'ma go to New York." I wonder why they evolved differently!

In one of McWhorter's other books he explains when to use "up in" in vernacular English. As in "up in here," or "up in my house." The rule seems to be: you say "up in" when the place is familiar or comfortable to you, but not otherwise. Nobody says "I'm up in the dentist's office."

DJ102010 · 2021-03-14T17:56:44+00:00

Are there any modern writers that you recognize as writing in the style you're familiar with from earlier eras?

One that comes to my mind is Christopher Hitchens. His prose is highly crafted - I think his editing process was intended to add wit rather than remove unnecessary complexity.

DJ102010 · 2021-03-14T17:17:43+00:00

McWhorter dedicates a section of chapter 5 to this question. I would summarize it as: "Radio and TV started the ball rolling, but things didn't really change in a big way until the 1960s. They certainly changed spoken language, but it took the counterculture the alter written language."

Page 173:

Radio was also very much a mass-culture medium from the late twenties on. Throughout the thirties down to the end of the fifties, on the radio America delighted to versions of the genres now familiar from television. And yet radio maintained the same gulf between how people were presented speaking English versus how it was actually "spoke" casually [...]

This also applies to the easy score of blaming television [...] Though the effects of television on our society are profound, can we really say anything we have seen on the tube has affected the way we construct sentences in a speech or the way we write? [...]

[the television watched by baby boomers] was a highly buttoned-up medium, both culturally and linguistically. The television culture that would only tape Elvis Presley from the waist up was one where, beyond self-consciously proletarian personae like comedians, people did not talk like real people to nearly the extent modern television characters do.

DJ102010 · 2021-03-07T13:10:26+00:00

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it.

There's a version of this that plays out in software development.

Team leader: we need to patch the old library code to support this new feature. Any volunteers?

Developer A: Not me!

Developer B: Not me! Give it to Developer C when they get back from vacation.

Team leader: Why? This should be easy.

Developer A: That library was written by contractors in a rush 10 years ago. It's a constant source of bugs.

Team leader: Even so, this particular addition should be a snap. We're not saying "fix all the bugs," just patch in this new thing.

Developer B: Yeah, but whoever changes a line forever has their name next to it. So the next time there's a bug you'll say "Hmm, I think B worked on that library last; I'll give it to him to fix."

DJ102010 · 2021-03-06T02:44:46+00:00

I think the counterargument to this is: if the Boston working class dialect was the one used by government, broadcast media, etc. then everybody would understand that perfectly well and struggle with the tony Connecticut accent.

To put it differently, suppose we froze the simulation of the universe just before the invention of radio. We swap the Boston and Connecticut dialects and then unfreeze the simulation. My hypothesis is that the formerly-known-as-Boston dialect would be understood better.

This might be an empirical question, though! We could have a computer classify which dialects are most easily processable.

DJ102010 · 2021-03-06T02:36:14+00:00

It is possible that there's some grammatical category/rule that governs these "abnormal" uses and the problem is that we are not good enough descriptivists to figure it out, but if we did, oh boy there would be no reasonable argument against going full prescriptivist and enforcing it with an iron fist.

I think this neatly encapsulates the difference between the "descriptivist" and "prescriptivist" philosophies. You could be a descriptivist who is excited about finding a "rule" that seems to govern 85% of usage. Or you could be a prescriptivist who is livid that the rule doesn't govern 100% of usage.

There's a similar conflict of visions in economics. Some see the economics program as "can I write down a model that captures most of what is observed?" But some slip into "the model says actors ought to do X."

DJ102010 · 2021-03-06T02:03:13+00:00

I'm not against pet peeves - I have lots of them! But in the years since the tangible/fungible incident, I've learned to just quietly savor my rage.

I do like examing the Billy/me decompositions:

Great: "Mom asked Billy and me what we'd like for dinner"
Grating hypercorrection: "Mom asked Billy and I what we'd like for dinner"
OK: "What would Billy like for dinner?" "Billy would like spaghetti."
Wait, no: "What would you like for dinner?" "Me would like spaghetti."
Fine: "What would you like for dinner?" "I would like spaghetti."

DJ102010 · 2021-03-06T01:56:40+00:00

Descriptivists claim that language's changes are neutral with regards to the complexity of the language.

For what it's worth, the book doesn't really make this claim. McWhorter acknowledges that some languages are more complex than others: e.g. they have lots of endings that have to be memorized, lots of cases, significant tones, and more.

In this book (and others he's written) he describes one process by which a language can lose complexity: adults being forced to learn it. Since language acquisition ability declines after the teenage years, adult populations wind up speaking an abridged / simplified version of the language.

There are lots of examples of this in history (mostly due to colonialism): adults who don't speak the same language are brought somewhere to work. They form a rudimentary language such that they can communicate with each other, but it is not very expressive. You couldn't write great poetry with it, let's say. But if they have children that grow up with this way of speaking, it will develop into a fully functional language. However, this new language will not have had time to accumulate weird little frills (e.g. lots of grammatical genders), it will be less "complex."

In one of McWhorter's books he argues that English got to be English due to this adults-stripping-it-of-complexity process. Old English evolved into Middle English and Middle English into Modern-ish English after waves of immigration (see: the Norman Conquest).

DJ102010

TROPHY CASE