I also learned a ton about different instruments by playing that interactive game where you match them to their countries. Thanks to Encarta I was probably in the privileged minority of American 8 year olds that knew what the heck a digerido, pan flute, or sitar was! :D

Too right about the bed bugs. At the library they’ve had to start screening every returned book for them. Yeesh!!

We once took a gamble on a fancy tempurpedic mattress that was on local auction where my wife’s grandma worked. “Nah nothing seems wrong with it!” She said. Cool! Won it for cheap!

We muscle it into the house and only in the enclosed space did we realize it REEEEEKED of cigarettes. It was NAUSEATING. We eventually had to pay more to have it hauled away. Learned our lesson.

The plastic base for it was nice though, and was cleaned pretty well by applying elbow grease and strong cleaning chemicals and sunlight and fresh air.

Excellent list!

Man, how often needle nose pliers come in handy is INSANE.

Even quicker if you help!

Post-apocalyptic economics be like:

Monado is making impressive strides, but VR is a really tough nut to crack, given how ridiculously proprietary most units are. :(

The controllers especially seem to be giving them a lot of trouble.

I know M$ always extinguishes things it embraces, but they should really just release the WMR code if they’re done with ir. An open source WMR implementation would save SO MUCH headache of trying to engineer custom drivers and everything from scratch!

Upset about both of those too.

The WMR thing is bugging me so much. Like release whatever is needed to open the hardware if you’re done with it, jerks!

I have a Samsung Odyssey+ that’s a fantastic unit that of course I can’t run when I mainline Linux these days. Monado is making impressive gains but the fact that they basically need to hack and reverse engineer the thing out of being e-waste is just messed up.

I really like VR and want to make things for it. But I can’t swing a Steam set and there’s no way I’m giving a single rotten cent to Facebook if I can help it!

Like others said there’s still ways to keep it working but it feels iffy enough that it could just break at any moment =\

Geeze while we’re at it, even though it was basically a typical cop procedural, I really enjoyed “Almost Human” for a while. It just disappeared.

👑(crown emoji in case it doesn’t show) here, you dropped this.

LOL had me rolling. XD

Those features were so cool! I loved my Wii U also because of the underutilized potential it had. I wish we had a lot more simulative type experiences where the console as a “dashboard” could have made more sense.

Oh man are you me?! I used to love Jones! They had really interesting flavors and I liked the featured photographs. :D I kicked soda a while back, otherwise I’d still be all over it. I’m glad they’re still around and I’m happy seeing them on the shelves.

Batman Beyond, totally shway! Cyberpunk Batman was such a ridiculously cool concept I’d love to see come back. That intro was so freaking cool. :D My wife and I just watched through the whole thing not too long ago.

I’m torn though: A reboot would be so excellent, but that “2’000’s cool” aesthetic was essential to the unique feel of the universe it set up. Like, man can you imagine if we got an Arkham type game with some Deus Ex mixed in!?

Moderation is still a lot of thankless work. I think it’s pretty cool as long as you enjoyed doing it and weren’t shackled to it. :)

Haha really? That’s interesting, I always heard it was the opposite. HDDs might slowly develop problems and if you’re lucky you’ll have time to move everything over before it kicks the bucket.

But SSDs will one day just fail.

Maybe the actual cause of the failure has to do with it?

There’s an effort called Monado that’s making strides, but we hope there’s a sustained interest and a breakthrough of some sort. The controllers are no-go at the moment.

Is microsoft actually bricking their WMD headsets or just not supporting them anymore? Could you still treat it as a retro gaming console?

So they’re not literally “bricking them”, but effectively doing so. They require “Windows Mixed Reality” to run, all the drivers are proprietary, and M$ is “deprecating WMR”, at which point it will no longer be offered, and will be taken down from the Microsoft Store.

So basically you’d require an un-updated Windows 10 machine that previously had it installed, or else the device is a paperweight.

They can’t even pretend to have any kind of “environmental responsibility” when they’re actively just creating tons of e-waste as a matter of policy.

Hey friend! Yeah I forgot that. I added it to the original post but here it is:

OS: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Mobo: Z590 Aorus Elite AX CPU: i7-10700k @ 5.1 Ghz GPU: Nvidia RTX 3090 Mem: 32GB DDR4 (forget the speed…3000?)

I don’t wanna sound desperate or anything because I know I’m blessed here. I only upgrade like once every 5+ years.

Prospectively I’m not looking at a brand new build, just a CPU/RAM/Mobo to maybe move to DDR5.

The current setup (minus the GPU) would be moved over to my server which is still running like…an i5-4460 on 16GB of DDR3. Not terrible but it’s had to thrash on occasion. 😬 Haha.

Thanks for the heads up about Intel stability issues! I’ll have to keep an eye out about AM5s.

I probably can’t justify it before everything hits the fan, but y’know, it’s good to keep my eyes out. :)

Oh believe me I’m already there. I just made the jump to start gaming on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed after using it primarily for art and dev, and 99% of what I care about runs beautifully. While the world around us seems in constant chaos…

… we’re living in a great age of open source for those who seek it. :)

Speaking of bricking hardware. I’m very upset that they’re just dumping Windows Mixed Reality because it isn’t making them 10,000% returns or something.

Lots of wonderful HMDs will just be paperweights without a ton of work.

“Can you release the code to us to keep em running then?”

M$: “Lol no.”

If anything, maybe we’ll see a lot of good hardware going for cheap, ripe for the taking by anybody who knows how to use a boot USB and doesn’t care about TPM. :)

Honestly that’s pretty fair. Depending on the nature of the drive. You don’t know if it was sitting there spinning up and down in some mining rig (that one crypto used HDDs to store hashes) sitting on somebody’s washing machine or something LOL.

I do see where you’re coming from and appreciate your optimism. I have ADHD and I’m prone to catastrophism haha.

But I feel like there’s actually substance and credibility to how much the very near future is gonna suck. :( I’m trying to stay optimistic though!

Yeah that’s what I’m thinking, although tech is a “depreciating asset”, the work I can do with it is (potentially) valuable. I have a decent fleet of computers at the moment, old laptops with Linux, an old server, and my and my wife’s main rigs.

Thing is I’m a 3D artist, so I wonder if even the current setup I’m blessed with could see me behind the curve in a few years time :(.