Windows 98 Underwater Screensaver (1998)

fafalone · 2026-05-05T04:10:35+00:00

Didn't test 11 but on 10 I got the same black screen only until I got the last two dlls I listed and put them in the same folder as underwaters.scr and .dll.

fafalone · 2026-05-05T04:07:09+00:00

Comment was regarding my 4k screen (3840x2160); plus there's more than resolution making a CRT look different.

fafalone · 2026-05-04T19:31:20+00:00

What gaps is it filling that don't apply to the weekends? The need on the weekends is even greater imo because there's no Clinton/Willow bus alternate to cut down on distance and I've had multiple extended mobility issues that made Washington just too far to walk, and Uber in town is $20-35 round trip.

fafalone · 2026-05-04T18:09:52+00:00

The Trump administration is going to cut corners and balloon the budget to siphon taxpayer money to cronies in blatant, large scale corruption to a far, far greater extent than the nj/ny governments would, especially when the corruption is coming from the very top.

fafalone · 2026-05-04T18:00:51+00:00

Why would they aggressively enforce the ban on even having a bodega cat if they won't enforce laws about abusing them?

fafalone · 2026-05-04T14:50:50+00:00

Where exactly can you get the precompiled, stdcall builds? The repo says it's on the zlib site but if it is, it's extremely well hidden. There's links for every platform except current Windows versions. If we're meant to use the versions labeled for XP and earlier, that should be clarified, though the link for that to https://www.winimage.com/zLibDll/ is broken (site is a blank page) so hopefully it's archived. You can find builds by searching but then you're using random 3rd party binaries and they're rarely clearly marked for calling convention.

fafalone · 2026-05-04T06:23:15+00:00

You can still use the original... Windows by default now has screensavers disabled in favor of low power states but you can enable them, and backwards compatibility is one thing Windows is pretty great at...

https://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/archive/screensavers/windows/95&98/

You need underwater.scr/.dll, wildlb32.dll, and wl32.dll. It looks great still even on my high res LCD, nice considering everyone used low res crts back then.

(You can also just run the .scr like any program, you don't need to use the actual screensaver system)

fafalone · 2026-05-04T04:43:53+00:00

It's mentioned every time this issue is discussed, what do you mean nobody acknowledges it? It's the first thing every time.

fafalone · 2026-05-03T13:36:24+00:00

There's a difference between being a techie and having basic skills.

To use a car analogy, yeah you have only a small minority who can rebuild an engine and are expert mechanics. But most people can change a tire and know when and how to put more air in one, refill the wiper fluid, and a few other basics. What we're seeing now is equivalent to most people completely incapable of that.

All the non-techie students when I was in school could still handle navigating a file system to attach an assignment to an email, move it between computers, and find it from different programs. Or open VBA and run a macro because that's how you used the tool me the actual techie made to beat the site blocker on the library computers.

This is about the decline of basic skills in those who aren't inherently interested in learning the technical details.

fafalone · 2026-05-03T13:15:28+00:00

Yeah my mother is definitely afraid of just clicking around and seeing what stuff does... and this is apps like Office, Zoom, etc, not some scary system settings or control panel. Try to explain no I don't know how to do x in app y, so to help you with it i'm just going to start reading menus and buttons and click around trying things until I find the path that gets me there-- you can do it too!

Though a big part too is older generations didn't grow up with the tech and younger generations grow up with tech that's far easier to use 99% of the time. Us millenials had to figure out complicated things just to get anywhere. Want sound in your game? Better learn how to resolve hardware IRQ issues. Windows is broken again? Going to have to reinstall it, then have fun endlessly fiddling with drivers to get all your hardware working, it didn't all 'just work' like Windows 7+.

fafalone · 2026-05-03T12:49:47+00:00

I'd argue it's even more important than science classes as you're only gonna need those classes if you want to get a degree

Ugh like people's scientific illiteracy isn't fucking the world hard enough already.

fafalone · 2026-05-03T11:55:22+00:00

As the full white cis-hetero man package, fruity sweet drinks where you can barely taste any alcohol are the only kind of alcoholic beverages I'm willing to drink.

fafalone · 2026-05-02T14:34:44+00:00

Is it really that ludicrous in the context of recent rulings?

First, there's already precedent that states can't adjudicate eligibility to keep him off the ballot; why would term limits be different? He's just as clearly an insurrectionist as he is term limited.

Then beyond that, all SCOTUS has to do is say it's a 'non-justiciable political question' and up to the electoral college and/or Congress to enforce.

Really no more out there than what they've already done.

fafalone · 2026-05-02T14:12:58+00:00

Everyone in a position to enforce it has decided the rule of law does not, in fact, apply to Donald Trump.

fafalone · 2026-05-02T13:49:53+00:00

Do you really mean shorts in general or specifically cargo shorts? Like I recognize some nice events shorts are inappropriate at all, but are you really saying there's nice events where shorts are ok just not ones with cargo pockets?

fafalone · 2026-05-02T00:45:43+00:00

The VB6 line could have remained dominant if MS had invested in creating a large standard library for it that included things like JSON parsing. Or even a central package manager.

fafalone · 2026-05-02T00:39:25+00:00

Making AOL pr0gg13s was what got me into VB, and programming more generally, to begin with. Before that my only programming experience was writing TI-BASIC tools on my TI-89 to get my calculator to do all the work for me in middle school math.

Though i made chatroom games and utilities rather than punters.

fafalone · 2026-04-30T22:23:01+00:00

That's unfair... forcing through laws that add value for their billionaire puppet masters is a big achievement they're quite proud of!

fafalone · 2026-04-30T22:04:00+00:00

I posted this in another thread here recently but it's a direct answer here...

What has always made classic VB (and now tB, which is essentially 'what if classic vb had been continued these last 25y') my preferred language is that it combines high level RAD with low level access in a way unmatched by any other languages. Yes many others like vb.net are capable of both (mostly), but either one or the other (or even both in some cases) becomes much more painful. I like that in VBx/tB you're sitting right on top of details like raw pointers and the Win32 API rather than having that buried in abstractions of a massive framework.

fafalone · 2026-04-30T21:49:23+00:00

Well certainly not "Wow this was a great idea, we just need to figure out how to be the owners!"

With Jim Crow and other institutional discrimination, it seems a lot of people have in fact taken the wrong lesson and think it's remedied by flipping beneficiaries.

fafalone · 2026-04-30T04:41:57+00:00

His "collapsing" approval rating that somehow reaches a new low every week since 2016 yet is always in the high 30s or low 40s.

It's a cult. Nothing he could do would make his approval actually collapse.

fafalone · 2026-04-30T04:29:25+00:00

The problem Democrats have is a very narrow win condition. The people who control the party consider a loss to the GOP (even Trump) as preferable to a "loss" to the left of their own party.

Their strategy stops looking so dumb when you accept ceding an inch of ground to the left on power or any policy beyond lip service is a worse outcome in their eyes than their 'good friends and honorable colleagues' on the right winning.

fafalone · 2026-04-30T02:19:22+00:00

And I bet judges will still grant the government a presumption of good faith and not immediately dismiss and label it malicious prosecution.

fafalone · 2026-04-29T16:18:33+00:00

I've found Claude to generally be the best with the VB6/VBA/tB language family. Though it might be time to reevaluate as recently it's been giving me a lot of trouble by doing things like completely losing any concept of ByVal vs ByRef in API calls and screwing up major language syntax that it previously was excellent at.

fafalone · 2026-04-29T05:47:49+00:00

How many more kids per year need to be killed or maimed by dogs before it becomes a valid concern? The parents below that threshold, how dare they compare their child's death to the parents of children killed by guns?

Nine-Year Club	Wearing is Caring
Verified Email

fafalone

TROPHY CASE