That game shaped my gaming life in a thousand ways. It still stands as one of my most memorable experiences.

I don’t know if the emulation is the problem or not, but I’ve tried replaying it on multiple Genesis Emulators and found it almost impossible due to something imperceptible that makes firing the gun just a millisecond too late after pushing the button. And the group you’re fighting moving just slightly faster than you. Combining to result in very quickly getting beaten to death in your very first encounter with gangers.

I’ve tried multiple settings on multiple emulators and I can’t solve it.

That really depends on your definition of “holds up”.

For example, to me the original Final Fantasy VII is still a better game than the remake because what was a well thought out RPG combat system got turned into just another button mashing combat experience with a Final Fantasy VII wallpaper applied to it.

Is the remake better graphically? sure. Does that matter to you? Than yeah…the original isn’t going to hold up for you. But if you prefer the classic design from those times, the game holds up great from a gameplay/story/character perspective. And I personally would take it over whatever mash-fest modern games use for combat systems.

Would it not be “une chat”?

I thought French indefinite articles were gendered, like other romance languages like Portuguese and Spanish.

But it’s been roughly 35 years since I dropped highschool french…

I believe OnlyOffice may be problematic from an ethical perspective if I remember correctly because of Russia or something. But it’s FOSS, has a linux desktop version, and its compatibility with Excel has been absolutely rock solid for me.

Advertising isn’t the problem. And before I get my balls cut off, I’ll back away slowly while explaining myself…

We’ve always paid for ads. Back in the old days you paid for a cable subscription and got to watch ads every 15 minutes. That’s not a new phenomenon. Hell, television was designed around the advertising break. The entire one hour series 5 part script model was created with the “cut to ad break” in mind. You think about your CSI:Miami “sunglasses of justice” stinger, or your fourth ad-break plot-twist as the Romulan war bird uncloaks and the music dun-dun-duns into a commercial for cheese-its…

That’s not a problem in and of itself. In fact I kind of miss it when shows were written that way. Heck, Tubi and Pluto TV do it and no one complains about that. And if Netflix wants to add those back into their free tier, more power to 'em.

But advertising is not about getting served a few commercials every fifteen minutes anymore. It’s literally in front of the content, within the content, etc… It’s not about “hey look, it’s an ad break, let’s go refill our 7-up and take a piss”, it’s inlaid with the content, as well as taking up as much, if not MORE time than the actual content itself. and THAT’S part one of the problem.

Part two is the fact that if you’re going to make more money by making me pay for your service AND watch advertisements, you better damn well be giving at least some of that new money to other creatives that are MAKING those advertisements. Make a commercial with actors and actresses; pay them. Hire a writer to create ad-copy, just like we used to do. But if you’re going to charge me AND make me watch lazy shit you made with A.I. slop, than THAT is where I’ll happily take my ship and head onto the high seas.

I’d be perfectly happy to sit through two or three traditional advertisements every fifteen minutes just like we did in the old days. But what I WON’T stand for is watching five minutes of lazy A.I. ads after every five minutes of actual content and be expected to PAY for the service on top of that.

Guns can be reloaded.

Can’t pardon yourself from a bullet…

I use Cromite. It’s a more hardened fork of Bromite. Which itself is a hardened fork of Chromium.

The only thing I’ve found so far is that it likes to block the discussion threads on some websites. But other than that I’ve had no issues whatsoever.

It’s not designed to be an anonymous service, just a private one.

I think this needs to be said a lot more often and a lot louder. Anonymous and private are NOT necessarily the same thing, nor should the expectation be that they are. Both have a purpose.

Went out for supper the other night with a buddy of mine who came to visit from out of town. He’s a systems technology trainer coordinator at a community college. (Basically, he teaches the teachers about new technologies before they have to teach it to their students the next term.)

We were talking about tech at supper, specifically windows, and I realized that I have been on Linux for so long that I completely lost any knowledge of how to do any of those things in Windows. And I’m honestly okay with that.

I guess I should point out that I’m a cis male. I didn’t even look at what community I was in. Just saw an interesting topic on my “all” feed and immediately thought of two people I look at for inspiration in management. My apologies for intruding. Didn’t mean to at all. Didn’t even notice the community name. I’ll show myself out.

Without muss, fuss or ego, she just takes control of whatever situation she finds herself in. And she’s strong enough that everyone accepts it because she leads by example and proves that she knows what she’s talking about every time.

Quiet confidence.

Very much reminds me of Tyrion Lannister telling his grandson that any man who has to keep saying he’s the king is no true king.

Kathryn Janeway and Ellen Ripley. Both for the same reason; leadership ability.

I know, right?!

Burn me at the stake for thinking that even in the pits of hell, there are some little moments of good, even if fleeting.

This morning, the guy in front of me at the Tim Horton’s drive-thru paid for my coffee. Don’t know him. Never met him. Never exchanged three words. He just decided to do it. I just sometimes randomly decide to do it as well. Made me feel good so I did it for the person behind me. I don’t know how long that chain lasted, but hey…it doesn’t matter.

The world might be shit, but that was a nice start to my day, and a nice start to the day of the person behind me. If I was “Mr. Realist” above me there, the response would be, “well fuck…what’s the point? Sure, but the coffee’s just going to get cold sooner or later…”

Screw me if I want to take some simple pleasure where I can, I guess.

Haven’t checked today since I woke up and went to work. But the post is 14 hours old, which means when it was posted I was happily watching some Red Letter Media on Freetube last night. So working fine for me (then at least). Will check when I’m home.

I’m the king of the pessimists. But I like to take five seconds when there’s actually good news instead of constantly being the “well actually” guy. Then I return to my regularly scheduled “realism”.

Not in denial about anything at all. It’s just a miserable life to never take pleasure in the little wins.

Edited to add - I don’t know if you know your literary history. But the irony in accusing someone called “Hemingway’s Shotgun” of having rose-tinted glasses is absolutely delicious.

Fair enough. But the world being what it is, can’t we just celebrate a win for a few precious minutes before we shit all over it?

TV shows were mostly terrible.

Ummm…excuse me?! You had me until that point. Then you lost me.

Modern TVs fascination with having a whole “season long” episode that requires viewing all in a row is not better.

I would rather, and usually do, select a random episode of TNG, Quantum Leap, A-Team, Simon and Simon, X-Files, etc… where they have an hour long adventure, then have a new one the next week. You don’t need to worry about binge watching to “catch up”; just any random episode is a self contained story that you can enjoy and then get out. And sometimes the occasional two-parter.

If at first you don’t succeed, avoid child endangerment charges and put your students in another irresponsible situation next week.

And this is why, all those years ago, the Mercury and Apollo astronauts fought against a fully automatic ride without manual controls (which was NASA’s original design)