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ieure

@[email protected]

Emacs enthusiast, builder of software, repairer of hardware. I like difficult music, weird keyboards, old computers, and coin-operated machines.

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ieure ,
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Sergio @klu9@piefed.social avatar klu9 the Higher Luke Theory, if you will.

Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam

Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam is a 1985 American science fiction comedy film starring Jim Varney. It was written and directed by John Cherry. It is the first film to feature the Ernest P. Worrell character, but it has a slightly darker tone than his later films. It was shot in Fall Creek Falls State Park, Boxwell ...

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@FiniteBanjo@feddit.online avatar FiniteBanjo @verdantbanana@lemmy.world avatar verdantbanana I don't recognize it, but Reddit r/tipofmytongue would figure it out.

@ieure@retro.social avatar ieure , to random

Completely wild to me that people allow their own computers to display advertisements.

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@LaurenceWolse@lemmy.world avatar LaurenceWolse I've seen this one, I appreciate that it's one of those films where the title contains everything you need to know about it.

@ieure@retro.social avatar ieure , to random
@ieure@retro.social avatar ieure , to B Movie Bonanza

Get Crazy (1983)

Hippies, punks, teens, and musicians mix at The Saturn for a every year for a New Year's Eve concert. But this time, Colin Beverly plans to sabotage it so he can demolish the building and build a mega-skyscraper for his record label.

So far, typical 80s small-time villain fare. But the vibe is off, they seem to be shooting for Airplane! or Police Squad! style zany, but more obvious, more relentless, more over the top, and less funny.

Barely a scene goes by without, say, an anthropomorphic joint getting chased by firefighters, or stage manager Neil seeing his love interest and turning into a jungle me-Tarzan-you-Jane fantasy, except they're still talking about the show. It's like they made the whole movie out of the dream sequence.

Starring Malcolm McDowell, Alan Garfield, Ed Begley, Jr., with appearances by Bill Henderson and Lou Reed(!)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085551

bmoviebonanza@lemmy.world icon B Movie Bonanza

@ieure@retro.social avatar ieure , to random

Got some parts for one of my newer games today.

Reproduction Ms. Pac-Man arcade marquee, bezel, and control panel overlay.
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ieure OP ,
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"Newer" meaning I bought it recently, not that the game is newer than others I have. It's the same age as those.

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CPO on mine is very sad.

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Ms. Pac artwork is well-known for having the pink fade to off-white. Here's the new one compared to the original.

ieure ,
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Sergio Big fan of creature flicks that are just the name of the creature.

@ieure@retro.social avatar ieure , to random

It's Always Funny in Sillydelphia

@ieure@retro.social avatar ieure , to random

Today is my birthday. If you'd like to do something in recognition, please donate to your local food bank. November is going to be tough for a lot of people.

If you're not in a position to donate, reply with an image containing, strange, threatening, and/or surreal energy (example attached).

Boosts appreciated!

A photo of a freeway overpass. The traffic is moderate, the sky is blue. A man in white t-shirt and jeans strikes a pose next to a large banner with "I'm Single" in hand drawn red block lettering.
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@ptoothfish @Binder Oh man, I'd love to explore those ruins.

Kraa The Sea Monster (1998) is what happens when Godzilla’s sleazy cousin crawls from a Jersey swamp in a rubber suit that reeks like a stale Domino’s pizza box.

https://atomicpoet.org/media/dd7a251235ad9f318e0a10da7270a8ee1279240ce57318c355e6b919f773087e.png ...

Poster for the film Kraa! The Sea Monster. A massive, reptilian monster with glowing yellow eyes, sharp teeth, and clawed hands rises from the ocean, glowing with fiery energy. A small helicopter flies near its head, emphasizing its scale. At the bottom, two young people in dark futuristic uniforms with gold belts and shoulder patches run along a pier, looking terrified as a giant wave crashes behind them. The movie title “KRAA! the SEA MONSTER” is boldly displayed at the top in bright green and yellow letters. Want me to make a shorter, accessibility-focused version too (more concise for screen readers), or keep this cinematic style?
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ieure ,
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Sergio janonymous The best bad films are like clown shoes. Clown shoes are funny because of information asymmetry: as an audience member, you can clearly see that the clown is wearing clown shoes, but it's always surprising to the clown when they trip over them.

Similarly, some of the best bad films are the ones where the production team is convinced they're making the next blockbuster, but you know they actually made Alien Private Eye.

@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , to random

Ah… it finally happened… I asked Google "6/10 < 9/20" in All mode in a drugstore aisle so I could get an answer from Google Calculator, and the "AI" answered instead. I asked Google to do math and they redirected the query to The Machine That Can't Do Math. I guess I've now run out of reasons to delay switching to Kagi even a day longer

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ieure ,
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@mcc Also, per Kagi's own docs, "Kagi Search includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes as well our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers."

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-brave.html

@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , to random

I actually hated Aqua the first time Apple tried it too

ieure ,
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@mcc Always thought it looked really ugly, but at least it had visible scrollbars and clickable things looked clickable.

@ieure@retro.social avatar ieure , to random

I tried to check out a pickup grocery order with the Safeway Android app. it asked me to confirm my card's CVV and billing ZIP code. When I enter them, it doesn't enable the "confirm" button, so they're both forcing me to a thing, and not allowing it to be done.

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Logged in on the web, to be greeted with a "We think you might have more than one account" message. I do not have more than one account.

ieure OP ,
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The options on this "We think you might have more than one account" modal are "Confirm" and "I'll do this later label" -- the latter indicating placeholder text there is no readable value for. It probably shows in English if you have a different language set up.

ieure OP ,
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Try checking out on the web. The "Confirm" button enables when I enter the CVV and zip! Clicking "Confirm" pops up a modal: We missed you! Your cart is waiting. Sign back in to continue shopping"

I am already signed in.

Behind the modal, I can see it says "There was an error while processing your card." Nothing was processed.

ieure OP ,
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Try going to my account to confirm the CVV. I get the same "There was an error while processing your card" error, but no modal claiming I'm logged out. Network inspector shows an empty 403 error calling https://www.safeway.com/tokenize

Disabled every extension and setting that might cause an overzealous WAF from rejecting my request, same result.

ieure OP ,
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Try updating it in the account section of the Android app. Same result, the "Confirm" button never enables.

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Updated the Android app. Same problem.

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They have a support chat in the Android app. I explained my problem, but it's a stupid fucking AI chatbot, so it slopped out some useless shit about gift cards.

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There is a cookie control icon covering the left side of the text input box in their chat, so I can't see the first word I write.

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They "escalated to the IT team," who say there is no problem, despite nothing working and me sending a screenshot of it not working.

They say I should wait "at least... an hour or two," which means I won't be able to pick up the order today.

I have spent 45 minutes trying to pay for groceries.

@ieure@retro.social avatar ieure , to B Movie Bonanza

Twister's Revenge (1988)

Absolutely bonkers hot mess of a film from producer/director Bill Rebane (Monster a Go-Go, The Giant Spider Invasion). Three yokels (who are like The Three Stooges if Moe was a redneck doing a Joe Pesci impression) decide to steal the computer running a KITT-ripoff nsentient AI self-driving monster truck. Hilarity ensues.

This one has some very bizarre stuff, with occasional flashes of confoundingly competent filmmaking, like the cartoon-style first chase scene. No matter how bad this film is, it's still got a monster truck crushing stuff and an epic battle sequence finale.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133246/

bmoviebonanza@lemmy.world icon B Movie Bonanza

@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , to random

Webdev folks, I have an open ended question.

I want to store (somehow) a linear list of items. I want to be able to add to this list through an infrequent process. I then want to make the thinnest possible frontend (in which ever of rust, typescript, python or perl is appropriate) turning it into paginated blocks of JSON.

The two ways that come to mind are:

  • a big text file,
  • MySQL

Would the text file have an overhead advantage? MySQL seems heavyweight just to store a single sorted list.

ieure ,
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@mcc Various NoSQL solutions are widely deployed, but usually for narrow usecases, like supporting a specific feature in an otherwise all-SQL shop.

They failed as general-purpose datastores, because getting good performance requires the one thing most programmers are incapable of, thinking ahead.

ieure ,
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@mcc SQLite is a solid choice for your usecase, its main bottleneck is that it only allows a single writer, which doesn’t sound like a problem for what you want.

If you want to look at NoSQL stuff, tkrzw (yes, that’s the actual name) is a collection of BDB/DBM-like libraries.

You might also look for a Datalog DB, these are popular with Clojure, but I’m not sure how many non-JVM options there are.

You can also do the stupidest thing that could possibly work, and use the filesystem. One file per item, readdir / fopen (or your lang’s equivalent) in a loop to load them.

@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , (edited ) to random

For three full years now I've been semi-daily posting a music recommendation in a big long thread, but it turns out 300-post threads kinda break Mastodon, so I have to restart the thread every so often.

This post is a placeholder. I normally make a YouTube playlist for the previous year to put at the top of the thread, but I've had an awful month and haven't finished that yet.

But if you want to see year three's posts, they're here: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/112356066616688565

And here's year four:

ieure ,
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@mcc Purely because you mentioned sampled guitars, I will tell the short story of the guitars in Chemlab's 1993 Burn Out at the Hydrogen Bar album, because I think it's neat.

They hired a guy to come and noodle on guitar in the studio for a few hours, and recorded everything. Then they sampled what they liked and built the track from the samples. Then paid the player to come back and play those arrangements live. So it has the dynamics of live guitar, but with the mechanical feel of an industrial metal song with sampled guitars.

And I think that's super cool and sounds very good.

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@mcc I don't!

@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , (edited ) to random

2024
Week 9
Language: Ada (Spark?)

Confidence level: High

PREV WEEK: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/114463342416949024
NEXT WEEK: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/114582208242623432

So I start reading the manual for Ada. I think: This is great! This has all these features, conveniences etc I was wishing for for years in C++, and didn't get until I jumped to Rust. I might have been using this for games in 2010 if I'd dug into it then!

Then I start writing an actual Ada program. It turns out to be basically a pain in the ass.

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@mcc Early PC BASICs let you pick 0/1 indexed on a program by program basis.

Is Ada by variable, or by value held in the variable? Like if it's by value, do functions with array args have to inspect the value before accessing index 5?

@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , to random

FUCK

fuck they fuckin got me

Like 10 months after I switched Chrome->Firefox, I FINALLY accidentally clicked on the "add link to Pocket" menu item

Now I've got a link in my "pocket". Fuck

ieure ,
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@mcc extensions.pocket.enabled -> false

@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , to random

If there were an open source tool named "Spatula", what would it do

ieure ,
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@mcc Download tens of gigabytes of dependencies from SpatulaCity.

@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , to random

Raw Thrills' giant LED retro games are pretty good actually

ieure ,
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@mcc They are pretty cool. I don’t like most Raw Thrills games, but those are good.

H2Overdrive is also excellent, because it’s a spiritual to successor to Hydro Thunder.

@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , to random

If you think about it dryads are just land mermaids. They swim through the earth but slowly

ieure ,
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@mcc If dryads are land mermaids, mermaids are wetads

@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , to random

Can someone explain "PodOS" to me in one sentence. Is it an OS

ieure ,
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@mcc I found a demo setup you can poke at: https://browser.pod-os.org/

What it is or is for are still unclear to me after poking around in there.

@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , to random

Super fucking frustrating thing in Android: In Do Not Disturb mode, there's a special setting for "receive calls from: - your contacts - anyone". However also it's possible to add "Phone" and "Phone Services" to allowed apps. This won't do anything unless you ALSO set the separate flag. I've been having problems for 2 years with important calls not going through in "Do Not Disturb" mode despite having "Phone" on allowed apps. Only found the REAL switch today.

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@mcc I run Graphene and literally an hour ago got a "missed call" notif, with zero other indication that a call had been received, soooo

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@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , to random

If aliens received a full copy of the source code to Rust (which is, of course, written in Rust), would this be sufficient to reverse engineer the syntax and semantics of Rust and successfully create a bootstrap that compiles the Rust compiler

(Assume they do not have a priori knowledge of the English language which the code comments are written in)

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@mcc Knowing a little about how Rust is currently bootstrapped from source: the humans who created Rust can't even do this.

@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , to random

Is .cbz better than .pdf

ieure ,
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@mcc cbz stands for cragon ball z

@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , to random

There's a website that requires third party cookies to work (fine) and Firefox is blocking the third party cookies (also fine) except then I re-enabled third party cookies for the site (very much not fine). The Firefox instructions said if you click the shield and turn off "Enhanced Tracking Protection" it will allow third party cookies. If it's not doing that, is there some other secret thing I need to do?

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@mcc You can't do that in a container tab, only a profile.

@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , to random

I hate Unity

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@mcc pinned toot

@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , to random

Question: If you use an XBox Series X normally up until it receives the 2024 update that causes it to announce that in one month it will be cutting off support Brook fightstick adapters, then immediately turn off updates, disconnect it entirely from the Internet, wait most of a year, turn it back on, and plug in a pre-2024 Brook fightstick adapter, will it work?

Answer: YES AND I AM HAPPILY PLAYING PAC-MAN CE DX RIGHT NOW

ieure ,
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@hyc @mcc @emaytch Many games used 49-way joysticks. Bubbles and Arch Rivals use the same Williams opto 49-way, and some 90s Midway titles did as well.

ieure ,
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@mcc @hyc @emaytch Yes. My friend has one.

@mcc@mastodon.social avatar mcc , to random

This week I have been enraptured by this very straightforward meme where seemingly every animator on YouTube/TikTok has been recreating this short video clip with their preferred OCs/game engine

"breakcore in a nutshell"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOPQk943BX4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3NVuO8ZUOQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trgNE1bxxQs

[Original video by @poordesignart on Instagram, original song "anybody can find love (except you.)" by hkmori]

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@mcc I’m super grateful that I got to see KJ Sawka in his early days, the dude was an absolute monster live. Really incredible stuff. Happy for his success, but I sure would love to see some solo stuff like this agaon.

Here’s an ancient low-quality video that gives some flavor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b98BJ36K1wo