For mysterious undiagnosable seemingly hardware related issues, the power supply is always a good place to start.

Be aware that Dell has a nasty habit of using “proprietary” power supplies that have the pins switched around on the ATX connector, and thus won’t work unless you either buy one of their stupid OEM supplies or get a pinout chart and rearrange the pins on your new supply before you plug it in. I don’t know if that model is one of the ones that does this, so you might want to check first before you potentially smoke your board.

Every once in a while my machine requires cleaning, not just reseating, the RAM and/or video card edge connectors and slots for no readily identifiable reason. I have no idea how any kind of crud or oxidation manages to accumulate in there given that my PC never moves, it’s not in an especially humid environment nor one with temperature fluctuations, and as far as I can tell the air in here is acceptably clean. But it does nevertheless, and when it gets into that mode it will randomly reboot or blue screen with no rhyme or reason until I remember to hose everything down with CRC contact cleaner. I have to do this once about every 2-3 years. (Yes, I have had this build long enough for this to happen more than once…)

[BFG Division Intensifies]

That, or even street drugs are so expensive now no one can afford them. Damn inflation…

How we have lost perspective. When I was that age I was forced to walk to school, a distance of about 1.5 miles.

Forced, mind you, because if you were considered “too close” to the school you were not eligible to ride the bus. Other than the land directly adjoining the school grounds, the roads I had to use also did not have sidewalks. The number of children killed, maimed, or injured by this during the years I attended that school were, to my knowledge… zero.

The trope of video/audio breaking down into static is an easy shorthand that is unlikely to be forgotten, probably even well after all the devices capable of doing so have long since been buried in the landfill.

It’s especially hilarious in media depicting the far-flung future, where apparently all technologically advanced space men and their communications devices – not to mention high powered central supercomputers and so on and so forth – somehow still work over NTSC television signals. Even by the early 1980’s it should have been entirely predictable that in “the future” anything like that would be digital, considering we already had widespread digital audio media (CD’s), and digital video was already making inroads into the computing industry.

Tube TV’s remained in common service well into the 2010’s. The changeover from analog to fully digital TV transmission did not happen until 2009, with many delays in between, and the government ultimately had to give away digital-to-analog tuner boxes because so many people still refused to let go of their old CRT’s.

Millions of analog TV’s are still languishing in basements and attics in perfect working order to this very day, still able to show you the cosmic background, if only anyone would dust them off or plug them in. Or in many retro gaming nerds’ setups. I have one, and it’ll show me static any time I ask. (I used it to make this gif, for instance.)

In fact, with no one transmitting analog television anymore (probably with some very low scale hobbyist exceptions), the cosmic background radiation is all they can show you now if you’re not inputting video from some other device. Or unless you have one of those dopey models that detects a no-signal situation and shows a blue screen instead. Those are lame.

Shallow Thought Of The Day: Any game mentioned in this thread twice is automatically someone who didn’t read all the comments before posting.

Especially because certain aspects of the storyline are random on each playthrough. Who is and isn’t a replicant is not always the same, nor is how certain characters will react to the same dialog questions on subsequent runs. Depending on how the cards fall, this arguably also includes you.

Yes, I still have this on all four original CD’s.

I had this as a kid. From a shareware compilation CD.

For the Gen-Z kids in the audience, that’s like a little snapshot of the internet that you bought at a computer show or flea market for $2, and was worse than the internet because it didn’t have any boobies on it, except it was better than the internet because your parents wouldn’t gripe at you constantly for always tying up the house’s telephone line and you barely had to wait to play anything on it.

Where was I again?

Oh yeah. I got my ass kicked by that game. It was also cool that you could set any Windows .ico file as your player character, though. You could run around as Captain Notepad or Sir Calculator the Algebraic if you wanted to.

Commander Keen

Only if you never watch CV-11.

That’s the neat part: I don’t.

Not anymore. I scaled back my fast food consumption quite a bit in previous years, but when the prices of everything skyrocketed to absurd levels during COVID I just quit going to fast food places and never looked back. I get Taco Bell or something like, maybe two or three times a year now and that’s usually when I’m on a road trip or something. Otherwise they can get bent as far as I’m concerned.

If I want slop it’s cheaper and honestly also easier to just buy a TV dinner from any of the selection of general goods stores within walking distance of my house and pop it in the microwave. And these days probably faster, too, because I don’t have to deal with the McAttitude or inevitably discover that the fast food place is trying to run with half the staff it’s supposed to have because its franchise owner is a greedy prick, nor have to worry about getting sucked into the thrice-weekly fistfight in the parking lot, nor getting caught in the crossfire because some fuckmuch is salty about not getting enough ketchup packets and decides to shoot up the joint.

1. He is not a sitting president yet.

2. He was not a sitting president when the offenses occurred in 2016, either, when he had yet to be elected. Even if the “presidential immunity” ruling could somehow be twisted to apply to this as if it were an official act, he was in no way shape or form president at that time.

I found some additional articles on what he said about this, and he did indeed flat out say he expects the “other countries” to pay the tariffs. For instance, this.

A sweeping tariff policy will kill two birds with one stone, Trump says: It could find a new source of revenue for the U.S. government, which could offset losses from lowering or eliminating certain forms of income tax, while extracting money from rival governments.

That’s not how tariffs have worked at any point in history.

They all thought the foreign company paid the tariff.

This is probably what Trump thinks, too. I can easily believe he is that stupid.

I’m also wondering just what the fuck Trump and co. are going to do with all the money obtained from these tariffs. Just, like, spend it all on hookers and blow or what? Remember how you all believed this was the party of “low taxes?” Yeah, guess what a tariff is, fuckers.

An AC-130U. We can play a game of see how many times you can hit it with the side guns before it lands in the ocean.

Thanks.

I have a set of matching super historically authentic pants in the same pattern and material (with suspenders!) as well. I might even still fit in them, but I haven’t tried in a while.

I usually attack it with a terrycloth and some Flitz. A little will go a surprisingly long way.

There are various methods of oiling, waxing, or otherwise preserving it afterwards. I prefer boiled linseed oil for that, personally.

In Ye Modern Times, you could also just make your mail out of something that doesn’t rust. I didn’t, though.

IIRC the whole thing about the land mines exploding when you step off of them is purely down to the Bouncing Betty or the German S-Mine, which saw widespread use and gained its infamy in WW2. They almost worked in the manner described, actually going off with a time delay rather than waiting until the hapless soldier removed his foot from the plunger. But they used a small lift charge to pop the main explosive up into the air a couple of feet and then went off, with the aim of shrapneling in a circle a whole group of soldiers passing by and not just whoever stepped on it. Obviously this wouldn’t work so well if someone were standing on it at the time.

The popular conception formed that they went off “after you stepped off of them,” which was true in most cases (who was going to just stand there like a nincompoop after you’d just triggered it?) and then Hollywood writers of the era just assumed that most or all landmines worked that way and wouldn’t let that misconception go. So now here we are.

And then there is specifically the night Gwen Stacy died.

The X-Wing is explicitly hyperdrive equipped. That’s also part of why it has an astromech droid seat in it (R2), apparently so the droid can handle the jump calculations. A lot of later technobabble in the expanded universe expounded on this after the fact, but I presume this decision was made on a snap basis specifically so Luke could go to Dagobah in his cool plane spaceship.

You get to make hyperspace jumps yourself in your X-Wing a few times, fittingly, in the X-Wing games.