20+ year professional game dev here. This commercial conflates a mix of common game client bugs (eg: texture streaming errors, physics glitches, and animation attachment offsets) with straight up nonsense (upper half of coffee mug popping in with a phone over and over is caused by a slow network connection?). They never show any actual network performance problems that they, as a company, have been responsible for causing in real life.

It's as if a city council came out with electrified upgrades to their formerly-diesel city buses and to promote this fact, they cut an ad showing:

- monkeys driving the bus
- constant gunfights between the elderly
- piles of feces on the floor
- bus stops existing in a quantum superposition of clearly identified and invisible
- tribal warriors on the roof spitting blowdarts at passersby
- every seat is actually a block of super-chilled ice

Never once would they point out reduction in chronic asthma to the local schoolkids or lung cancer in their bus drivers. But hey, so long as the company looks good, who cares about accuracy in ads?

My dad has this attachment to 50s rock and roll and he rightly believes everything in pop music was invented in the 50s and possibly the 60s.

I remember most of these songs (the british ones) coming out and me being fascinated by what could be done differently to what was then the mainstream. However pop quickly devolved through the 80s and I found myself meandering back in time, from late to early Talking Heads, from late to early Genesis and Floyd and Yes and Jethro Tull and Mike Oldfield and Fleetwood Mac, discovering the Beatles and the Beach Boys were actually good at some point, finding out Frank Zappa was a thing and discovering that yes, the guy who made late 20th century pop music up in his garage, with his searches for new sounds and writing his own music and lyrics was indeed one Buddy Holly in the 50s.

Anyway I found myself listening to a rather childish track by Basement Jaxx years later and could not quite put my finger on what made that one track work for me. All these bands that only have one really good track... Anyway what was going on was a Gary Numan sample.

So I went back and listened to some of this old stuff and I was really surpised that some of it still works.

But back in 1980 if you heard Numan, early Midge Ure Ultravox minus the ubiquitous title track of the album, Visage, or a couple of years later the Eurythmics you would hear a sound that was strikingly new and different.

Thinking back Peter Gabriels 3rd solo album (although itself very electronic) took me out of the electronic pop bandcamp and more into alternative rock. That and lucking into a friend who had an older brother who had all the old Genesis records also as sheet music including lyrics. That or David Byrne.

The main point is the music you like is the music you liked when you were 13.

Wikipedia says no one noticed the sideburns until 1979.

Nice to see a face to attach to music from Tron and A Clockwork Orange.

Also the Moog synthesiser is pretty interesting, not least for the difficulty in finding out the correct pronunciation of the name.

I guess Louis has never seen the inside of a server. No server CPUs have fans attached, but instead rely on other fans inside the chassis. Probably Apple should have made that small heatsink out of copper, but were trying to save money instead.

Apple deserves to be railed against though - recent years they treat their laptops as throwaway like phones. If you have one, make sure you’re religiously doing backups and bought the AppleCare warranty. After that expires, be ready to shell out another $1200+

Ruh roe....

A new $2.7 BILLION lawsuit has been filed against Fox, Giuliani, Powell and hosts Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro accusing them of intentionally lying about Smartmatic in an effort to mislead the public into the false belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. They are still weighing their options about filing against OAN and Newsmax, but seem prepared to attach them as well.

Between this one and the Dominion lawsuit, this could be the end of "conservative" media....expect Limbaugh and Beck to be next....and possibly even individuals who repeated their blatant lies. You got a few billion lying around? They don't.

You're all guilty of spreading the lies, you all damaged the reputations of these companies enough to force them to all but go under, reparations for the libel and slander are going to destroy the right.

You all deserve it too. Spend it while you've got it.

Sorry to be the little grey raincloud on this Hate The Hedges party, but you might want to understand the implications of what just happened

Y'know that fund that's getting all attention, Melvin Capital? Yeah, fuck them, right? Fuckin' shorters all shortin' and shit -- they played, they paid!

There's a reason they were bailed out and with all due haste.

Here's the issue: they were VERY good at the shorting game. So good that they actually had to turn away business. They made money like horses makes shit. When clients couldn't get in at Melvin, they went elsewhere. That opened the door to a lot of other firms basically mirroring exactly what MC was doing, which included shorting the fuck outta GME.

Fuck those guys too, right? It's their money, so why should I care?

Let's go back a few year, shall we, to the glorious chapter in finance and economics that was the 2008 Crash. Remember when Paulson lost his shit because he realized that in about 36 hours, the basic system called Western Capitalism was going to shit the bed; the bedroom; the whole house and pretty much every surface above the ocean within a planetary radius? This is sorta like that. Only worse.

The thing about short squeezes is that the losses can be infinite, and that's exactly why WallStreetBets did what they did. They knew if they bought and held -- diamond hands -- the stock would have to rise as the shorters had to cover their bets. Melvin Capital and a shit-ton of other, smaller firms had to do that and ran out of liquidity long before GME was even at $50. For every share of stock they shorted, they need to cough up another share at a higher value -- and they HAD to actually have the higher-priced share.

And here's where things get VERY ugly.

Shorting GME was such a sure thing that a huge number of shorts were placed. In fact, more shares of GME were shorted than actually existed. Oops. But hey, SURE THING, BABY and what's the worst that can happen?

Yeeeah, y'see where this is going now?

So these firms, not only are they broke, they don't have the shares, either. They need to come up with shares, pronto, at any price, because contractual obligations are a motherfucker in the finance world. But again, more shorts than there are shares and the people who have the shares, WSB and 4chan's /biz/, aren't letting them go. The longer they hold, the higher the price will go as short after short faces having to cough up the shares they borrowed.

A lot of people are about to lose a LOT of money -- the kinda losses that have so many zeros attached that looking at the number bores the eyes.

Back to 2008: the reason the whole world almost started Mad Max LARPing back then is that a narrow number of highly-important financial institutions were a wee bit thin on liquidity because they were having to pay it out by the boatload. That's bad. What would be better is if risk were more distributed, and how could that little plan POSSIBLY go wrong? Maybe a Black Swan event involving a huge amount of money that needs to be paid out by all of them due to this annoying bird.

That's where we are now, but no one even remotely knows what that figure is going to be. Again, (potentially) infinite losses multiplied by 150% times the number of shares actually available, multiplied by the dogshit risk factor on the loans and the leveraged payouts -- your best case scenario might be a loss of about $500 billion. Someone has to come up with that money, be it the Fed or other banks/investors, but that latter group has to come up with the money themselves, which is generally accomplished by selling profitable holdings. We all know what happens when a lot of people have to sell, right?

I always wanted to live in interesting times, thus proving what an utter fuckwit I am.

Is that a Trump accomplishment, teaching people to attach well-worn adjectives to undeserving public figures?

Deal with what, exactly? Funny t-shirts? Enjoy your funny t-shirt. Notorious for nothing yet.

Dude, have you BEEN to Carson City? Due to familial attachments, I find myself in that berg about once a year. The people are nice enough, but this ain't exactly Mensa's fishing grounds. I needed a computer fixed, so I go to the address of the local computer repair guy. I get there and it's actually a pool hall lined with Hombres' bikes. I thought, "I don't give a shit if this is a Cray, I'm not going in there."

That fucking computer is STILL broken and I haven't been back since Covid hit.

I took a 2,500 mile mountain bike trip back in 2011. I was aware of the problem of loose dogs chasing bikes. With two saddlebags strapped to my bike with my belongings I knew I would not be able to outrun a Chihuahua let alone a pitbull, German shepherd or a bear.

I carried an air horn from Walmart that I attached to the bike with Velcro for a quick grab. I had no less than 7 dogs surprise me during my trip. The air horn was very effective in showing them who's boss. Their ears fold back and their tail tucked between their legs while running in the opposite direction.

Even if a dog managed to grab me, I doubt it would be able to withstand the hurt it would inflict blasting in its ear at close range.

Edit: I'm assuming no one thought I would shove the air horn in the dogs butt.


https://ibb.co/xJTfSj7

And they think they deserve ANOTHER multi billion dollar handout/bailout from taxpayers, another socialist handout for free, no strings attached at all, but won't commit to upgrading service or even keeping employees employed (considering their competence level, that's reasonable, a monkey on meth would do better).

Same story at United. Fly Southwest.

If one of these customer service crews was just found at the ticketing desk torn limb from limb by hand, customer service would improve instantly. A carry on bag full of sodas makes a great weapon, and drawing and quartering sends one hell of a message....just saying.

Just a side note, while airports screech at you to social distance every thirty seconds, airplanes are flying at capacity with zero possibility of any social distancing, instead you're forced to have physical contact with other passengers. Don't fly during pandemics unless it's absolutely necessary.

That's really cool! But help me understand the physics. 🤔

How is the upper half being held up, is it really just the rope attached to the middle lower wood that's supporting all the weight?

*promote

Your video, A fox who became attached to a human after being rescued, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Pfft I can remember when they used to put a tiger in your tank. They would give out stuffed tiger tails that you could attach to your gas cap then let it hang out after you close the gas door.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/lJYAAOSwWUlaw3AC/s-l1600.jpg

Don't go there.

Dude. DO NOT GO THERE!

Do not ruin it for me or I SWEAR... I will jump off a bridge with my underwear still attached to it.

What is The Deal with your Weird random Capitilization bOb?

Is this Bob #4 or #17?

What has Trump done that is "great"? Still waiting for an answer. Bob #2 might not have attached the new cover sheet to his report from the other day, ask him if he saw the memo about it.