I cannot tell you how much I loved this stupid game. It was basically just “DOOM, but in the Old West,” and I still played it relentlessly. To this day, it’s the only LucasArts game I’ve ever finished.
It’s also the only FPS I could ever get my dad to play. He enjoyed a lot of Atari 2600 stuff when I was a little kid —we had hours-long Basketball, Football, and Baseball tournaments— but as the decades unspooled, he wouldn’t play anything but Bejeweled, IndyCar Racing, and Outlaws. (And he sucked at all three.)
Seeing this has actually inspired me. I think Outlaws is like $1.99 over at GoG… I may pick it up, just for the hell of it.
What Happens When Facebook Heats Your Home ❝ Big Tech data centers are not only being used to power the internet but also to heat people’s homes. But who’s really winning when Facebook keeps you warm at night?
Donald Trump Used to Get Nazi Greeting at Work: Ivana 💭 I’m less struck by Trump’s everyday fetishization of genocidal lunatics than by the blasé reaction of everyone around him. He was never crazy-rich, after all, and his zero-sum greed was legendary… so kissing his ass wasn’t that profitable. I feel like people just “let it go” because it was impossible to take seriously the actions of such a trivial man.
They Didn’t Ask to Go Viral. Posting on Social Media Without Consent Is Immoral 💭 Mass-media outlets used to conduct themselves with a level of decorum: they’d illustrate a story about obesity with a sidewalk shot of dozens of fat people, but they’d always crop out or blur the heads. Today’s internet prank fucks and click-chasing scolds have no concept of restraint. And this is why we can’t have nice things.
Gossip TikToks Are Carving Away Privacy IRL 💭 This is super-creepy, and is one of those weird little phenomena that are actually more relevant to day-to-day life than the techno-panic over a half-dozen dumbfucks deliriously jerking off to Bin Laden’s manifesto on TikTok.
Twitch immediately rescinds its artistic nudity policy ❝ Mere days after Twitch updated its content policy to permit certain kinds of sexual content, the platform has withdrawn the portion of the policy permitting “artistic nudity.”
The buttons on Zenith’s original ‘clicker’ remote were a mechanical marvel 💭 We had one of these when I was a kid, and their mechanical nature meant that most primordial dads were super-protective of their Space Commands. It was entirely possible to wear out the mechanism, so no one else was allowed to touch The Precious. Naturally, I clicked the fuck out of it anytime he was gone.
John Waters and David Lynch really love Lana Del Rey ❝ This isn’t the first time Waters has praised Del Rey. “She’s very David Lynch to me,” he added in the RS interview. “She infuriates people, but I think she’s in on it. I really want her to hook up with David Lynch, because he produces great albums these days.”
Walton Goggins’ Fallout Role Is Far More Interesting Than It May Seem ❝ Nolan also revealed that they intentionally dialed back on The Ghoul’s prosthetics in order to ensure that Goggins’ performance comes through all that makeup. As Nolan explains, the team didn’t want to hinder the reasons they cast Goggins in the first place by burying him in makeup.
2023 in social media: the case for the fediverse ❝ A new kind of social internet is currently forming. Right now it might still look like “Twitter and Reddit, only different,” but that’s only the very beginning of what’s to come. Hopefully.
23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9 million users — It’s probably too late and my warnings are pointless, but please kids… don’t give something as valuable as your DNA to a for-profit company that views security as a cost-center. It’s not just the millions of 23andMe suckerscustomers who have lost control of their genetic identity… their family members are compromised, too. Maybe it’s just me, but finding out you’re actually 8% Neanderthal isn’t worth giving the Russian mob the blueprints to your ancestry.
COMIXOLOGY, RIP — I was there at the start, with my little iPhone 3GS, ready to plow through a digital comic collection in Guided View mode. I was certain Comixology was going to save the comics business, and revitalize the audience. Now here we are at the end, nothing has been achieved, and a decade of progress has disappeared into the Kndle app, never to be seen again. Fucking A.
Facebook Messenger Rolls Out End-to-End Encryption by Default — About fucking time, Zuck. I guess he figures the petabytes of pre-E2E conversations that they can use to train their LLM will suffice, so it’s time to let the peasants have their privacy.
What Did It Mean That Howard the Duck Was Trapped ‘in a World He Never Made’? — The ‘80s movie and modern MCU cameos don’t do justice to the comic book Howard of the 1970s. He was dark and weird and absurd and (?) sexy and grown-up in a way that other comics on the spinner rack hadn’t been in decades, and I was enthralled.
‘Now and Then,’ the Beatles’ Last Song, Is Here, Thanks to Peter Jackson’s AI — The song is very good, and the technical skill and care that went into its recovery is just as interesting. The video is just goofy fun, very much in keeping with The Beatles pre-breakup sensibilties. Overall, a delightful and unexpected treat in a year that was full of absolute bullshit.
DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs — As a household, we didn’t receive a ton of mail as a kid… we saw only a fraction of the junk that hits my physical mailbox these days. But every few months, the DAK catalog would arrive, and I knew I was in for at least a night or two of nerdy, consumerist joy. Page after page of discontinued, misconfigured, or too-oddball-for-the-general-market gadgets were waiting to tempt me with deep discounts on things no one really needed. Sheer bliss, I tell you.
At least three-quarters of my Computes were lost in various moves over the last forty years, but I’ve held on to a few… I have this issue somewhere in a closet.
Why did I hold on to this particular one? I have no damned idea. Compute had actually gotten a bit bland by that point… it was a breezy-nerdy enthusiast magazine in the early days, but as the computer-owning audience became less technical, it became glossier— in every sense of the word. When it died, I didn’t really miss it.
Unlike Compute’s Gazette, Byte, Ahoy!, STart, Amiga World, Electronic Games (not EGM!), Computer Gaming World, and Boardwatch, all of which I mourned.
‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Review: Play the Way You Choose — I can’t say I’m particularly eager to experience Bear Fuckin’ —I already saw The Revenant, thanks— but the rest of BG3 seems right up my alley. But it also feels like a lot of work, and I just don’t have the time. (I still haven’t played Disco Elysium.)
Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks Are Still Going Strong — I loved these fucking things as a tween. They were more intense and entertaining that my beloved Choose Your Own Adventures, and I gobbled them up with enthusiasm. Needless to say, I just about lost my mind when I encountered Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! books… until computer RPGs came along, and all the books ended up in a landfill.
Keyword search is finally coming to Threads — I’ve had a Threads account for a while. I have it open alongside Shitter and Mastodon. But I virtually never look at it, because it’s just Instagram with fewer pretty pictures of half-naked girls.
Russell Brand accused of rape, sexual assaults and abuse — Wow. I mean, I obviously knew Russell was a piece of shit… his YouTube channel showcases that quite well. And I know he’s a particularly dangerous piece of shit, because she’s dramatically smarter and more articulate than the vast majority of people who strike his pose. But his blithe and aggressive approach to sexual predation makes it clear that other people aren’t even real to him, which makes him one scary motherfucker.
Preferring Biological Children Is Immoral — Oh for fuck’s sake. It’s like we can’t allow “conservatives” to monopolize the world’s Stupidity Supply, so a handful of progressive types have to jump in and bring balance to The Force from time to time. 🙄
Sinéad O’Connor dies aged 56 — I won’t claim to have been a fan —I can’t name a song other than Nothing Compares 2 U— but between that one perfect performance, her headline-grabbing night on SNL in 1992, and the slow leak of mental health stories I’ve seen over the years, she’s never been off my radar.
Rolling Stone obtains leaked texts allegedly showing Andrew Tate’s trafficking tactics — The comment that popped out at me: “She doesn’t realize that following me makes life better for her.” WOW. This dude is so bad at what he does! DEAR GORMLESS BOYS WHO THINK ANDREW TATE KNOWS THINGS: first, he doesn’t. Second, If a man’s worth it, girls don’t need convincing… they will fall all over themselves and beg for the opportunity to follow him.
Deadpool 3 Cast Adds Jennifer Garner as Elektra — She looked pretty good in the role —twenty years ago— but that was about all Jen could bring to it. As a goofy cameo in a Deadpool movie, though, she could be great.
“We can’t send email more than 500 miles” — A now-ancient —in Internet Years— story about the fragility of computing infrastructure, and the bizarrely out-of-the-box ways non-IT people view this stuff.
The Daily Dad
Things you might want to know, for Jul 7, 2023:
This ‘80s Cult Classic Influenced ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ — Night of the Comet was one of those movies that touched on all the themes that geeky teens in the ‘80s liked —cheerleaders, malls, video games, and the death of everyone’s parents— and was thus mandatory viewing for those of us in that demographic.
Mid-1990s Sega document leak shows how it lost the second console war to Sony — TL;DR: they made the wrong decision at virtually every turn. Sega had a few good ideas in its corporate life —betting big on polygons at the arcade, the launch of the original Genesis/Mega Drive, and the “Genesis Does What Nintendon’t” marketing campaign— and one good idea that was horribly executed— the wonderful, doomed Dreamcast. Everything else? Sheesh.
