One time I was in the ER, and a doctor noted that my heart beat has a rather pronounced split s2 rythm which is something that doctors need to learn to discern when listening to a heartbeat, so for the next hour as I was waiting around, I had several other younger physicians stop by and say “hey I was told to come listen to your heartbeat.”
Made me feel a little special in a very peculiar way I haven’t known since.
I have a bit of a reputation among my friends for missing pretty basic stuff in games. My best guess is that I replay a lot of older games that I already know everything about, so it’s kind of a reflex to just ignore text that pops up on the screen. This is how I end up several hours into a game being unaware that there is a block mechanic.
Fascinating video from Technology Connections all about the color brown.
It’s not perfect, but as a huge fan of the game, it’s definitely close enough for me. I’ve played all the way through it like 3 times already and I just discovered how fun it is to play randomizer mode so I can keep playing again and again and it still feels fresh.
I have a higher tolerance for VR jank, but I’d say it’s like 90% of the way to being a proper VR port. I’ll list the most broken things:
All that said, everything bad I described takes less than 1% of the time you’ll spend playing, and for me it’s a dream come true to finally be in Hyrule experiencing everything I remember so fondly through my own eyes. The first time I stood under the Deku Tree, I just stood there for a few moments taking it all in and appreciating the true scale of it. Every time I’m crossing Hyrule field and hearing the incredible music, I always find myself thinking “I can’t believe I’m playing this right now.” I didn’t realize until typing this out just now, but it’s probably already one of my favorite VR games just because it was already one of my favorite games.
I play VR pretty regularly. The meta quest 3 is objectively a very good piece of tech, regardless of how much Zuckerberg sucks. It’s also a lot more open of a platform than many people realize. You can sideload apps easily and there are at least 3 ways to use it for PCVR without having any meta software on your PC at all. They’ve never come down on Beat Saber modding despite it being very clearly against the TOS of the platform. Ports of classic games have been dropping like crazy because AI is allowing non-programmers to build VR mods for existing games. I kid you not, I’ve learned of more VR mods for classic games in the past 2 weeks than in the past 2 years. It’s really popping off. Some ports still require a PC to play the game and other ports run natively on the headset, such as half life 2 and portal 1.
Lately, I’ve been hooked on playing Ocarina of Time in VR. Also, the Simpsons Hit and Run just got a pretty impressive VR port. I’ve got like 5 other mods in mind for games I want to check out next.
The native quest games are mostly fine with some standout bangers like Resident Evil 4 and Batman Arkham Shadow. My favorite multiplayer games are probably mini golf or table tennis. I think anyone who’s played table tennis in real life would be pretty impressed with how well we can simulate it in VR. If you’re good at table tennis, you can pick up VR table tennis and your skill immediately translates.
I guess Zuck’s focus has mostly shifted to the perv glasses now because the company doesn’t talk much about VR much anymore. The metaverse (or at least Zuck’s version of it) was pretty clearly a failure, so I assume that’s why they don’t like talking about VR anymore. It’s definitely a quiet time for the medium, but with the way mods of classic games are coming down the pipeline now, I’m pretty excited for what’s next.
Meta is still working on their next headset and it will likely be one of the lightest and most comfortable yet. The compute is getting moved to a separate puck which you won’t have to wear on your head. I’m hopeful that now the metaverse phase is basically dead, the medium will become more focused on games.
I once had a roommate who preferred to keep the peanut butter in the fridge for some reason. I didn’t really get it, but it was easy to accommodate so I did. Turns out they were just doing the same thing for me because they assumed that it was my preference. I have no idea which one of us originally stuck the peanut butter in the fridge.
Last time I went to use one of those stupid key kiosks, it was out of fucking keys. Not to worry though, some enterprising genius thought of a way for them to still make a sale in this case, and the best part is you never have to refill the blank keys!
When it’s out of keys, it instead asks you to just scan your key, enter your postal address, pay at the kiosk, and they’ll mail you the key simple as that!
Which means that somewhere out there, there’s a corporate database that knows exactly two things about you: what your house key looks like, and what your address is. We all know how careful corporations are with our personal data. I’d sooner make the key myself than give them that info.
$80b does not describe the figure that they put into Horizon Worlds, it’s the total of all R&D for their entire VR/AR ecosystem. The first VR headsets had to use screens that were designed for smartphones. Now, panel manufacturers fill custom orders of screens that are specifically designed to be used in VR. A lot of current-gen headsets are using panels that were custom made for a now abandoned meta headset. I could go on and on about the major innovations that they’ve brought to the medium, but it’s mostly nerdy shit that doesn’t sound particularly flashy. When the quest 2 came out, the controller tracking was so bad it would lose the controller’s position if it was near your face, so drawing a bow in VR was a crapshoot. Now, you can serve a ping pong ball behind your back. I don’t think most people realize how insane that is. The headset has no positional data for the controller if it can’t see it. They’ve gotten so good at predictive motion tracking using only IMUs that you can accurately hit a ball behind your back even when the controller is completely obscured by your body, and they did that all with software. There are dozens and dozens of similar small improvements that wouldn’t even be noticed by someone who doesn’t play a lot of VR, and many of them were incredibly complex engineering and software problems which are now solved.
Zuck’s still an evil bastard, and Horizon Worlds is a steaming pile of shit, but I’m a big VR nerd that’s been following the progress of the medium since before Facebook bought Oculus. I am so glad that Zuck was convinced that his metaverse idea was viable. It caused him to dump billions into R&D that would have taken years and years to develop organically. I promise you the entire medium of VR is now years ahead of where it would be if not for Zuck blowing all that money.
Plus now they’re seemingly pivoting to put all that R&D toward their perv glasses, which tragically seem to be catching on.
$80b for a shitty VR version of Facebook would be ridiculous, but that’s not all they spent it on. We went from $800 headsets that required an expensive gaming PC and tracking hardware set up around your room, to a $350 battery powered standalone headset that requires no external sensors and can play games like half life 2 without needing a PC at all within ~5yrs. That’s how they spent $80b.
Gator Days comics. It’s one of the only reasons I still go back sometimes.
A dog taught me about crosswalk accessibility. I was walking someone’s blind dog, and we were waiting at the crosswalk. When the opposite side of the street started chirping when the light changed (as it always does), the dog started crossing the street toward the source of the sound before I ever indicated it was time to move. I’d never thought much about the chirping sound until then.
This sketch is funny and everything, but I feel this part in my fucking soul.
Just consider whether you’ll be able to tolerate doing the work when you’re not going to be the one in charge of deciding what you work on.
This is my main apprehension when it comes to pursuing a CS career. I already have an undergrad CS degree. I got it right before LLMs were even a thing. I know I’m rusty, but I have pretty strong fundamentals. I was already working in IT as a student so I stuck with that and all the jobs I’ve had since college have been fixing broken shit for someone else. Part of me would like to make software engineer money, but I hear employed programmers talk about the soul-crushing monotony of staring down a bottomless ticket queue and burning up their passion for creativity on fixing annoying issues with software that someone else wants them to build and I unfortunately already know EXACTLY what they’re talking about. I’m so fucking sick of ticket queues. I understand the utility. I get why they exist, but goddamn it’s such a sisyphian way to organize a workflow. It never feels like I’m actually making progress.
I’ve been unemployed for the past few months and I’ve just started getting back into coding for fun and for the first time in forever I can feel what drew me to programming to begin with. Every time I had the “what’s your major?” discussion with a fellow student, I’d explain that the reason I was pursuing programming is because I like making stuff, and programming seemed like an obvious way to seriously level-up the kinds of stuff I can make. I usually got weird looks for this answer because I suppose I was expected to just say “money.”
Using the skills I’ve developed for something I’m passionate about and applying them to a goal that I’m either completely indifferent to or actually opposed to does not sound like a fulfilling career to me. If I spent all day on an annoying software bug, I’m not going to want to keep doing software after I get home. I already know this because I didn’t want to do troubleshooting when I got home after spending my whole day doing that. I had all-but completely stopped making things for fun because the hurdles I’d run into in my hobby felt too much like work. I’m only just getting back into it now because I haven’t been working for a while.
Part of me feels like I should at least try programming as a career, but I have a terrible feeling that I already know what it will do to my mental health.
At any point that I’m about to make a post online and I realize that the emotional energy required to continue engaging is more than I’m willing to commit to this particular discussion, I just bail. No reply, no downvote, just peace out. It’s really not worth it.
Here’s an episode of the podcast Citations Needed all about how much Mike Rowe sucks.
No problem. I was concerned I went way overboard so I’m glad it’s helpful. Just be aware that if you also use Freestyle Dash, basically anyone who’s familiar with 360 modding will be like “…why are you using that?” It’s over a decade out of support. Aurora is much lighter and up to date, but I’m old school and I’m nostalgic for Dream Theme. The good news is if you want, you can configure Dashlaunch to have both. You just hold some button you choose on the controller while booting and it will boot into FSD, Aurora, or straight into xexmenu if you want. Before I settled into a preference, I put both FSD and Aurora on all the consoles I modded.
Very true. All my shit’s automated these days anyway, but I remember back when Mr. Robot was still on air, I’d always be checking the torrent sites starting about 10 min after the episode dropped and I very rarely had to actually wait a full hour for it to appear. Fun times, and a very fitting show.
RGH was the first mod I learned. Back then, you needed to use an ace v3 mod chip. Now with RGH 3, you only need a resistor and a diode for most models. I still prefer RGH because it persists between boots. Mod once and have a cracked console forever.
Honestly I mostly forgot that bad update was a thing while typing that comment. Back when I was still paying attention, you needed a specific game to make it work. Naturally, that game instantly became way more expensive on the resell market. Also the exploit used to take a few minutes to run, but I’m pretty sure that’s much shorter now.
If you have the game you need or it no longer requires a specific game, then I guess there’s no major reason to hard mod as long as you don’t mind running the exploit each time you power up the console. I haven’t done a mod in a few years now, but was planning to do another soon. I’ll probably look into bad update just to familiarize myself, but I imagine I’ll still do RGH 3 because it lets me set everything up, install all the games I want, customize the dashboard, make the menus pretty by getting all the full box art for every game, and then the console just stays that way forever and cleanly boots directly into the custom dashboard with virtually 100% success. I also prefer Freestyle Dash over Aurora which makes makes me somewhat unusual, but I very much prefer having separate categories for 360 games, original xbox games, xbla games, homebrew apps, and emulators (I could only ever find SNES so that’s all I have). Also I just really like customizing the look and feel with the Dream Theme installed on Freestyle. Scrub through that video to get an idea how crazy customizable Dream Theme is. Aurora has one look and one category with all games as far as I know, but most people go with it over Freestyle Dash.
All that to say, I mostly just enjoy doing an RGH mod because it’s fun. I mentioned how the whole process makes me feel like an actual hacker, and that first time you see the xell screen pop up (meaning the hack was a success), it’s worth it for the dopamine hit alone. Also these days if I’m modding a 360, I’m probably doing it for a friend and it’s much easier to give them something that requires no special knowledge to use.
There’s also an EULA that you have to check the box for before you download the server software that basically amounts to “I acknowledge and accept that Microsoft can shut this down whenever they want for no reason at all and I have no recourse if they decide to do that.”