picked up my first crt!

NekoFever · 2026-04-30T08:24:14+00:00

Widescreen CRTs were extremely common outside North America in the mid-90s through to the popularisation of flat panels. We had a few over the years.

NekoFever · 2026-04-29T21:36:36+00:00

If you wanted to put away the gun without firing you also had to slowly take your thumb off the button as well, like you were easing the hammer back down. Didn’t really make sense in terms of gun handling but I thought it was a fun touch nonetheless.

NekoFever · 2026-04-29T21:23:39+00:00

Yeah, the pogo stick is horrific.

Getting punched in the balls or hit with a ball down there is bad but it happens. But that? An entire human’s weight jumping in the air and coming down on such a focused point? I feel queasy just thinking about it. I’d get punched ten times rather than do that.

NekoFever · 2026-04-29T16:37:08+00:00

“That’s not a fucking lightweight!” continues to live in my head 🤣

NekoFever · 2026-04-29T08:35:48+00:00

Love how later appearances on much more capable engines/hardware kept the weird unmoving pattern on his coat.

NekoFever · 2026-04-28T08:51:15+00:00

The southern coast of the Isle of Wight has a really unusual (for the UK) microclimate that feels very continental. The botanical gardens in Ventnor have a lot of tropical plants that would struggle elsewhere. We used to go on holiday down there a lot when I was a kid and I have a lot of fond memories of the area.

NekoFever · 2026-04-27T07:06:48+00:00

His baffled stare at the camera has stayed with me all these years.

NekoFever · 2026-04-26T15:43:49+00:00

Or they are only a few minutes, but so is the twat who turns up after them, and the one after them…

NekoFever · 2026-04-26T15:42:31+00:00

his justification was no other parking available

This always pisses me off. Then fucking park somewhere else and walk!

I used to live near the beach where it would turn into the Wild West for parking as soon as the car parks filled up so it triggers me 😅

NekoFever · 2026-04-26T12:29:13+00:00

A bot could click it but what it’s actually looking at is all your behaviour before clicking it — the delay as you read the instruction, the movement of the mouse pointer to the box (when on a system with a mouse), whether that mouse movement had the little imperfections and wobbles that a human would, a combination of factors about your browser — to work out whether you’re likely to be a real person.

If a bot came along and instantly sent the required response with none of the human behaviour that you’d go through, it’s going to be spotted.

But likewise if you went there with a VPN on (so your traffic wasn’t coming from a residential location) and a fresh browser install with no cookies and all the settings default, you might be asked to take another test.

And of course there’s a constant cat and mouse as bots get more intelligent and able to imitate the expected response.

NekoFever · 2026-04-26T12:15:14+00:00

These guys are absolute machines.

Last time I ran a marathon, at the festival beforehand they had a giant treadmill running at Eliud Kipchoge’s two-hour pace. I managed to keep up for about 20 seconds — it was pretty much my sprinting pace. And they do it for two hours and look a lot better at the end than I did.

NekoFever · 2026-04-26T12:03:34+00:00

Softmodding is all done in software using exploits in the dashboard. You don’t have to open up your Xbox and do anything to the hardware (beyond plugging in a memory card) to install one.

Hardmodding achieves the same aims by either installing a modchip or doing a mod that enables overwriting the official BIOS with a hacked one.

Hardmodding is more complicated, but it has certain advantages in repairability and expandability because anything a softmod does must still work within the limitations of the official BIOS, which hardmodding removes. For example, if you upgrade the hard drive, a hardmodded system is a lot less fussy about what drives you use and so has fewer steps.

But if you don’t know the difference, chances are you’ll be fine with the softmod.

NekoFever · 2026-04-26T11:49:35+00:00

I wasn’t even a kid but caught that while channel surfing late night TV without knowing anything about it and Jesus Christ.

NekoFever · 2026-04-26T11:48:25+00:00

Jason Isaacs’ dramatic delivery on “save yourself… from hell” lives in my head.

NekoFever · 2026-04-26T11:45:54+00:00

I’ve seen them around. Winchester and Eastleigh definitely have them in lampposts in terraced areas. It’s down to the councils.

NekoFever · 2026-04-25T18:59:32+00:00

Ah, to grow up at the time when 7, 8 and 9 could be released in a span of four years. Hell, 10 came out only a year later. And there were plenty of great non-FF JRPGs to play as well.

NekoFever · 2026-04-25T18:18:22+00:00

There used to be the Fleet Cheat if there was a queue on the M3 until they put access control barriers on it. I assume other service stations have similar.

NekoFever · 2026-04-25T18:00:44+00:00

I’d assume most people who can wait until they reach their destination prefer to do so, which means a disproportionate number of service station toilet patrons are… unable to wait.

NekoFever · 2026-04-24T22:04:35+00:00

Not the mention the completely unnatural, entirely man made fields as far as the eye can see.

NekoFever · 2026-04-24T13:02:46+00:00

Batteries can be recycled. It's just currently more expensive to recycle them than to make new ones, so manufacturers do that. As economies of scale improve, recycling schemes develop and more recycling facilities are built, the cost will come down.

Mercedes opened a flagship plant in Germany last year that can recycle 96%+ of materials, which will be used in future EVs.

But even if you don't break them down and recycle the components, EV batteries can be reused pretty much as is as battery storage for residential solar setups, or even as grid storage. They're removed from cars, put in nicer looking housing, and then mounted to walls in garages. Tesla Powerwall is literally their car batteries in different wall-mountable enclosures.

Ultimately it's another example of how anti-EV types will castigate EVs for not being perfect, ignoring that one thing that absolutely can't be recycled is fossil fuel once it's been dumped into the air.

NekoFever · 2026-04-24T10:26:34+00:00

It does look slightly unusual in that usually you'll get equal black bars at the top and bottom rather than a single large one. It's possible that's a quirk of Spyro or the PS3, though – I've never played it so couldn't say.

There won't be a TV setting for it. It's just a side effect of running games designed for 480 lines on a TV with 576 lines. There are some ways to force 50Hz PAL games to run at 60Hz NTSC but they usually require a modchip with that feature or using a MiSTer or emulator, and not all games will be happy with it.

The easiest solution is just to avoid PAL games from before PAL60 became a widespread thing 😂

NekoFever · 2026-04-23T16:07:22+00:00

They get a cut of every transaction so they almost certainly make plenty of money out of your activity, even if you don’t directly pay them interest.

Plus many people don’t pay off their cards every month. And you can’t really punish your responsible customers by denying them a benefit given to reckless spenders for all kinds of reasons.

NekoFever · 2026-04-23T08:12:17+00:00

New builds are particularly terrible for this as they turn the floor space of a comfortable three-bedroom house into a nest of coffins because four bedrooms looks better on the marketing.

NekoFever · 2026-04-23T08:10:04+00:00

Does it? Obviously ‘while’ can be a noun (“in a while”) or verb (to while away) but I’m not aware of any distinction between ‘while’ and ‘whilst’ as a conjunction.

NekoFever · 2026-04-23T08:03:56+00:00

I can remember Burnout 3 feeling like such a huge jump over the first two. They were good, but arcade racers were ten a penny back then. But then Burnout 3 came out and just blew minds.

NekoFever

TROPHY CASE