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PirateBear

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hubskier for: 3366 days

recent comments, posts, and shares:
PirateBear  ·  1696 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Maybe We Should Have Let the South Secede

Comparisons between where people "socially distanced" and where there are food deserts that require travelling for food. Excepting some outliers, pretty strong correlation.

I live in a major city in Georgia (not Atlanta). The nearest Wal-Mart is a 12 mile drive, and I have one Food Lion between me and it. If I order curbside pickup groceries from Wal-Mart, I come into contact with the person delivering my food and that's it. The absolute minimal exposure without ordering delivery (which most apps don't deliver where I live specifically). But I also just contributed 24 miles to this graph. If I go across the street and interact with dozens of people, spending a half an hour in FL, I contributed nothing.

I also see the county where I grew up in Tennessee, where half the population lives outside the small town and their weekly trip to the grocery store is a minimum of 15 miles. They will never be under an average of 2 miles, but they were already using the best practice of minimizing the number of trips out due to the necessity of it.

Don't get me wrong, the Southeast is long overdue for Shelter-in-Place orders and to do something to get people to take this seriously. The Governor of Georgia claims he just learned about asymptomatic spread 2 days ago. Florida's Governor still refuses to shut churches down, despite being a massive nexus for infection. The biggest cities in GA, FL, and LA really have the potential to get bad and officials in charge have done nothing to slow the spread or reinforce the medical system, even as people watch New York and Italy. Really hope the theory that the virus slows in warm weather is true, it might save a lot of people down here if it is.

Game Gear and Sega Nomad.

Game Gear had a more advanced screen and color options than the Gameboy Color 8 years prior (1990 vs. 1998), a backlight 13 years prior to the GBA SP (2003), and the landscape form factor that nearly every system since the GBA has used. It even had a TV Tuner attachment, and an adapter to play Master System games.

It also eats 6 batteries in about 2 hours, actually rendering some longer games nearly unbeatable, as well as requiring a bag to carry around, whereas Gameboys fit in large pockets. The Game Gear was ambitious, but probably too ambitious for its own good.

The Sega Nomad has all that, plus it's a home/portable console in 1995, over 20 years before the Switch. Same caveats apply as the Game Gear.

PirateBear  ·  2412 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What's the best weather app?

I'm going to join the chorus of Weather Underground, and I also use Storm by WU in conjunction with WU. Storm provides a nice interface for watching radar, tracking storm cells, and following watches/warnings. And you can jump straight into a location-based radar without a lot of menus or scrolling. It also can do notifications for lightning and rain near you. If you live somewhere that strong storms are a fact of life, Storm is an excellent secondary weather app.

I was once scared to death of strong storms and drilling into radar and how storms move and form helps me get over it.

PirateBear  ·  2416 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: ‘King of Kong’ Star Stripped of High Scores, Banned From Competition

- This is what turned me on to the ballad of Billy Mitchell.

Saddest thing is he is actually an extremely talented player that held the record for 18 years and could still compete for it now had he not tried to pass off MAME runs as real hardware. Glad this vindicates Steve Wiebe after all the shit Twin Galaxies put him through though.

PirateBear  ·  2422 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: New desktop is en route - what have I missed the last few years?

Siege has a steep learning curve, but the destruction and strategy involved sets it apart from anything else out there. It take practice and time to do anything cool, but it is so satisfying to pull off a victory you shouldn't have. Watch a site called isthereanydeal for a sale of you're unsure, don't buy the Starter Edition any more.

For Dolphin, PCSX2, and I think RPCS3 (experimental PS3 emulator) processor power matters more than graphics card, but a current i5 should run the first two well enough.

PirateBear  ·  2422 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: New desktop is en route - what have I missed the last few years?

Depends on what you like:

I've put 300+ hours in Rainbow Six: Siege over the last two years, and it is a fantastic choice if you enjoy extremely intense, competitive shooters.

Cities Skylines is another fantastic choice if you like city builders.

Dolphin Emulator will now probably be able to run GameCube games at full speed at 1080/1440 enhanced resolutions.

PirateBear  ·  2437 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How Congress Censored the Internet

As of today, Craigslist's Personals sections are the first explicit victim of SESTA. They shut it down with an explicit message saying they can't risk the liability of leaving it open.

PirateBear  ·  2437 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How Congress Censored the Internet

Congress ignored victim groups that said that this threatened investigations into sex traffickers, ignored the DOJ saying that it will harm investigations and is likely unconstitutional (at least in part), ignored the pre-CDA 230 rulings that said websites were liable for content if they moderated content, and proceeded to pass this shitshow anyway.

Really hope someone goes after Facebook, Twitter, and Google with this. Either there will be a push to repeal it if it starts affecting bottom lines or the courts will defang it based on highly paid corporate attorneys' arguments. Especially because Facebook was promoting child abuse searches days ago: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180316/17330139439/did-facebook-violate-sesta-promoting-child-abuse-videos.shtml

PirateBear  ·  2437 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hours After FOSTA Passes, Reddit Bans 'Escorts' and 'SugarDaddy' Communities

I saw their new rules that were implemented hastily following the Parkland shooting, and it banned a bunch of things including drug and alcohol sales, gun sales, and "paid services involving physical sexual contact". SESTA might have played a role in that entry, but prostitution is more illegal than most things on the list. They also banned a dark web market and I think a gun board or two.

Don't get me wrong SESTA is a shitshow and I hope the courts defang it to the best of their ability, but the timing is likely coincidental.