dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

If you stick a penny in the back will it do a wheelie, too?

Roses are red

Violets are blue

They say it don’t be that way

But sometimes it do

The game was, you’d put one kid in the middle and then everybody else would do their level best to spin the damn thing so fast it would either drill into the Earth’s mantle or take off like a helicopter.

That happens in Super Castlevania/4, and then subsequently un-happens and never fully comes back. I have no idea WTF was up with that decision. Being able to whip in all directions was rad.

You can kinda-sorta whip diagonally upwards in Castlevania: Bloodlines and you can still do the thing where you hold the button down and fidget around impotently with the whip in Rondo of Blood and Dracula X, but that’s about it. Oh, and I guess you can do the thing in Castlevania: Circle of the Moon where you helicopter the thing around and it does crap for damage, too. Lame.

And for those of you not in the know…

Gradius, right? Konami’s many-sequeled, side scrolling shoot-'em-up game? They made a spin off series called Parodius (parody + Gradius, geddit?) and it was utterly bizarre.

I’ll just leave this here as an example:

This is the 2nd level boss from Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius, one of the SNES incarnations. You are a cat wielding a loaf of bread as a shield, fighting not just a kaiju sized schoolgirl wearing bunny ears, but two of them, one standing on the other’s shoulders. Who attack you by throwing angry Moai heads at you riding on paper airplanes and stuff. This is after you fought your way through a shmup stage that’s a Japanese high school based on Konami’s visual novel property, Tokimeki Memorial.

In the first level you ultimately fight your way through a disco, blasting at, among other things, multicolored penguins who are wearing afro wigs. While a SNES chiptune rendition of KC & The Sunshine Band’s “That’s The Way I Like It” plays in the background. The boss of that stage is an opera singing panda. I promise you I am not making this up.

Just… Just look at this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDEl1-tuzc4

And while we’re at it, a physical tactile keyboard.

Pool’s closed.

I can do you one better: My GPD laptop has a charging indicator on the center type-C port indicating that this is where the power supply goes, but it can actually be charged from either port regardless of the icon. Both ports are USB 3.0 or 3.2 or whatever the current fast standard is this week, but only the center one supports video out via an external GPU enclosure. So if you want to use it docked with an eGPU, it’s actually required to not plug the power supply into the port that says you should plug the power supply into it.

So not only is the marking meaningless, it’s arguably worse than meaningless because in one of the headline hardware setups for the machine it is actually 100% incorrect to do what the marking is telling you to do. Wrap your head around that one…

But if they omit the symbol entirely, they save 0.003 cents per unit, but they will continue to charge the same inflated retail price for it and all their cult members will cover for them by gushing about how sleek the “minimalist” design is.

We’re not calling it that anymore. It’s been rebranded to “SuperDuper Speed USB ]|[” now. Note that this is a different standard than the previous “SuperDuper Speed USB 3,” and under no circumstances should you call it “SuperDuper Speed USB 3.0,” because there was never any such spec and pedantic nerds will climb up your nose in the comments if you ever utter it.

It did. That may have influenced the naming convention. The LaserDisc was actually originally conceived as the “DiscoVision.” And if that name isn’t a veritable time capsule of its era, I don’t know what is.

“-Ette” is a common diminutive used to imply that something is a smaller version of something else. Like many things, we nicked it from the French.

Cigarette, a little cigar. Featurette, a short feature. Novelette, a miniature novel. Etc.

So, diskette, a little disk. Quite separate from the ones spinning in your company’s mainframe at the time. Those ones were two feet in diameter locked in a steel cabinet that weighs two tons. This one can fit in your shirt pocket. You get the idea.

But they’re still referred to as “drives” when arguably they aren’t that anymore, either. It’s really tough to ditch a moniker sometimes.

At its root this was originally a British vs. American English thing. However, the spelling of “disc” with a C has been used specifically as the trade name of various brands including both the throwable and optical media varieties, which have since become genericized trademarks.

For the optical media side of things, the name was coined by Phillips while they were consorting with Sony to develop the standard and named it the “Compact Disc” to compliment their already existing “Compact Cassette” product. They developed an official logo for the format which spelled it “disc.” That’s been with us ever since.

Volumes of computer storage are now colloquially referred to as “disks” because A) a significant majority of the early computer development milieu in general happened in America where we, or at least IBM, spell it with a K, and B) for a very long time, that’s exactly what they were. Tape and magnetic core memory and wire loop memory were all early developments that ultimately gave way to the longstanding popularity of magnetic platter/disk fixed storage… With some exception granted to tape, which hung around for a very long time but definitely was not a random access storage medium suitable for general purpose applications whereas disks were. It’s probably pure happenstance that the dominant non-fixed computer storage media also wound up being disk shaped, namely the various sizes and types of floppy disks. Computers handle linear tape based storage and random access disk based storage very differently, and nowadays random access permanent storage still has the “disk” moniker stuck to it even though it’s now likely to be solid state.

As a generalized descriptor of a flat circular object, either “disk” or “disc” is appropriate but which is preferred seems to be largely depending on which continent you’re from. The root of the word is indeed the Greek “discus,” as in the object yeeted across the playing field by Olympic contestants.

Fucking magnets. Saved you a click.

(Magnetic clothing buttons have already been invented. Repeatedly. You can buy 20 for six bucks on Amazon.)

Renaming it in Explorer does actually rename the file if all you change is the case (in current Windows, at least, see the pedantry below), but whatever mechanism Explorer uses to determine “has this file’s name changed” is apparently case insensitive. So it won’t refresh the file list. I imagine this is yet another one of those damn fool Windows 95 holdovers, or something.

You don’t have to do any multiple-renaming jiggery pokery. Just press F5 to refresh that Explorer window and magically then it’ll show you that the file’s name was indeed changed all along.

IKR?

Cheaters who cheat rather than learn don’t learn. More on this shocking development at 11.

If the US government bitching was enough to get the flight simulator easter egg removed from Excel (allegedly), I can’t imagine a similar stern glare from the Pentagon would not cause Recall to magically turn out to be uninstallable after all. At least from any US government owned computers originally so equipped.

Anyway, isn’t this only going to roll out on “Copilot” compatible PC’s with the requisite AI acceleration chips in them? I would be furthermore immensely surprised if it could not be locked out in Group Policy for corporate customers.

Nah, loot it for the magnets at least. Frisbee the platters, save the chassis for the scrap bucket (it’s solid aluminum).