Dear Nintendo,

Thank you for releasing Super Mario Sunshine on the Nintendo Gamecube emulator. It's just as frustrating as I recall.

Now give us Eternal Darkness.

The digitization of books is a worthy endeavour, preserving the contents of a medium which is intrinsically at least somewhat volatile by its nature. But not like this. Very much not like this.

There are millions upon millions of book-lovers across the world who would happily invest in a digitization library for the preservation of literature, especially rare and lesser-known works. There are, however, more responsible ways of doing so, which do not destroy the physical media (which themselves can be rather important -- the history of a book is a tale in itself!)

And certainly not just to feed the contents of the books into a slop engine, then discard that data. Is there any possibility whatsoever that the data can be recovered in a reasonable fashion? Any chance that we'll see those works of literature in unbutchered form ever again?

For those with a love of knowledge and learning, that is the ultimate crime. Impoverishing our world to feed an engine which will never deliver anything but bullshit, but in the hopes that it will deliver a higher grade of bullshit.

Been thinking a lot about burnout.

It's known that the AI disaster is burning through chips at a crippling rate, not merely for the here-and-now but for the foreseeable future. These are going to be supply shortages for years if not decades.

Then I look at Zuck saying that they're doing the same thing to people. Bragging about it.

Taking the best and brightest folks in the tech sector, luring them in, and then forcing them into a shitty position doing shitty work for shitty pay, until they burn out, hard.

They're killing the very people who could possibly save us from the death of the world.

In a rousing game of 'finish the headline in our capitalist hellscape', I guessed 'and the construction workers got none of it'.

I win a prize (of nothing).

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/belgium-gold-stash-10-million-discover/

Baptists going like, "Being poor and homeless is a moral aberration! They're choosing to live that way!"

Normal people: "Okay, and all the pedophiles in your ranks?"

Baptists: "W...well, you can't just judge a person based on one small thing..."

Really looking forward to the day when the people posting prolifically about how the Nazis need to be removed from politics and, ideally, polite society as a whole stop posting on the Nazi-publishing website.

Dear management,

If you tell me, "You can have a day off with your accumulated vacation leave if you work 12-hour shifts for the rest of the week," when I have specifically denoted that the reason for the day off is due to impending burnout caused by copious stress, what you are going to get is me being hospitalized for a grade-S panic attack and advised to take a one-month medical leave of absence.

That is not me being threatening, it is a statement of fact. I am not burning my meager vacation leave on a destress if you're going to be undoing every gain I might make, moments later. I am not going to be ignoring my physical and mental health for the sake of a number going up. If my job is so important that you cannot spare me for a single day in order for me to actually recover from having to deal with people screaming at me because their orders didn't get to them in time, because guess what, I can't destress over a single day, then you may soon come to appreciate what it's like to operate without me for a far longer period.

If a certain subsidiary of our groups is going to play stupid games, they should know that I know how to play the game. And I can play it better.

Tell us that you never received the piece of paperwork for the necessary routing? Keep doing that, over and over? Fine. I am now going to be sending an e-mail confirmation for each and every single piece I file. I am going to request a response in a timely fashion, that is to say, 24-48 hours, not a week. I am going to continue to fill your damn inbox with every single verification of these routes and save it in three goddamned places and CC it to internal groups responsible for monitoring until I am told in no uncertain terms to stop.

I am the stupid prize, motherfuckers.

If the bar serves citrus drinks that also makes it a limon-al space, and if it features non-binary versions of famous paintings, it's also a li-Monal space.

In the Persona series, the Velvet Room is an extradimensional space which the protagonist visits to perform tasks essential to their journey, such as the fusion of captured spirits into more powerful forms, the acquisition of hints, and occasionally other more esoteric mechanisms. It is always depicted as somewhere between, such as an endlessly-ascending elevator, a lounge with a piano and blue curtains, or even the character select screen.

In Persona 4, it appears as a long, moving automobile with a bar set up inside, which of course makes it a limo-nal space.

#gaming #persona #puns

Must the number 7 route be completely fucked specifically on my day off?

I have yet to see any proof that even the most egregious cyberattack has done to the water system even a fraction of the damage that has resulted from mass privatization of a public resource.

All these people talking about the 'remote data center' botnet and I just can't even.

This is what we knew would happen with the Internet of Shit, this is the one and only logical iteration! Yes, it's even shittier than before, but what would you expect?

Wasn't the burning of the Library of Alexandria once considered one of the greatest tragedies of the literary world?

I want to be clear here, it seems like the people in charge are revisiting all the horrors of the past in pursuit of a moment more at the top of a virtual heap.

Every single fucking capitalist institution right now has been saying the line 'we wouldn't mind a union, we're just concerned that people might have been forced into it' for going on 75 years now and I'm really sick that the credulous media keep reprinting the obvious lie.

Our society has a tendency to force people into capitalism, a broken system full of broken ideas run by the most broken people of all. People don't have to be forced into a union, just show 'em that they could get a few basic human rights if they join.

I wonder how many watchlists I'm on.

There are probably two of them labeled 'threat to the order of society' and 'likes pineapple on pizza'. Whether these are probably the same watchlist, I leave up to the reader's discretion.

So a case against a man who wiped his GrapheneOS phone with a duress password during what I can only assume was an illegal search-and-seizure operation -- the presumption of innocence, with regards to CBP, ICE, DHS and the Department of in-Justice, has long since evaporated -- is now progressing. The material facts are not in dispute, the question is whether he had any right to do so after having been refused an attorney repeatedly.

I do so hope they go to a venue with a judge who will call them out on the fucking floor. Even some Trump-appointed sockpuppets are getting tired of his hand up their ass, so even with an Atlanta jurisdiction, fingers are crossed.

Of course I'm fucking cynical. And it's not just because I'm trans or gay or because I've wound up in a customer service position.

It's because blind optimism is a fucking drug. You need a healthy dose of cynicism to see what needs to be fixed. I save the optimism for when it comes to actually looking for how to do it.

I pine for the days of older chatbots and IVRs. They were stupid. But they were demonstrably, honestly stupid -- they did not make false claims that they could solve every problem and replace human beings. They drew from a set of most-common solutions and did not, usually, balk at transferring to a living person if the answer was insufficient.

It did not result in my getting phone calls from enraged customers who spent half an hour getting looped. Annoyed at the rise of cheap automation, sure. But not perked around like this.

Drain cleaner...

"Pour half a bottle down." Fie. Make the bottles transparent to make that easier. Some kind of line mark.

Meanwhile, cleaned out my kettle and noticed that the mesh scale filter on the thing had dissolved. You know, fine. It happens, it should be an easy part to replace. N.O.P.E. It seems that B&D don't like giving spare parts. It's a $.10 chunk of plastic, guys, don't make me toss a perfectly serviceable kettle for this 'KE1500-01' piece.

(I can do without it, of course. Just gotta take a bottle brush to the kettle more often, hardly a big deal, it's just a piece that'd be nice to have.)