I’m picturing Bob Barker hosting The Price Is Right with that weirdly long microphone of his in his hand with a cable draped across the set.

It’s one thing to appreciate good audio, it’s another to be so snobbish about it to the point of academic dishonesty.

Christians of Lemmy: You think your god would have bothered creating the universe if he knew it would inevitably lead to the existence of audiophiles?

Allow me to re-state, with emphasis:

Compared to

A LOT

of headphones available in the 1970’s, they sound amazing.

Yeah, there’s been good audio gear for decades, but there was also utter garboleum.

Compared to a lot of headphones available in the 1970’s they sound amazing.

I got to thinking about like, Amazon. To an American in 1970, the equivalent would have been Sears, the retailer that sells literally everything though an enormous catalog. They had department stores you could visit in person and they’d publish a phone book thick catalog for mail order. And there was a time that Sears could have bought Amazon outright for chump change. I remember a Tim Allen stand-up routine where he talks about mail ordering a tool from Sears, and it arrives 6 to 8 weeks later. Shipping is now usually a matter of 1-4 days.

But no, the real answer is probably wireless headphones. Like if you were showing around a tech enthusiast from 1975 around my house, the thing that would probably break his brain the most is a pair of wireless earbuds.

Computers are things you can personally own, most of the people on the planet own at least one, probably including one that fits in a pants pocket.

Steve Wozniak once proudly told his mother that some day, he’ll have a computer of his very own. Richard Stallman, in his now famous usenet post announcing the beginning of GNU, says that “one manufacturer has already promised us a machine.” So, Richard Stallman was working “In the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT”, and even in that position there was a question as to where he was going to get a computer for his project. In 1983.

Women cosplaying Lara Croft by stuffing a box up her shirt will never stop being funny.

Yeah English phonics is a garbage fire. Just look at that last sentence.

Is there anywhere on earth that pronounces the R? FEB-you-air-EE.

That’s not an English word, that’s a space catholic word.

I have a disdain for technical latin, Stop telling me I have hypernatremia; high blood salt is exactly as detailed and like 54 syllables shorter.

I’m from the American Southeast. I speak with a tarheel drawl. To listen to me speak, you’d think the word “rural” has four Rs in it. Rrrrl.

Was Star Citizen scope creeped?

I seem to remember it kind of always being sold as one of those “do everything for everyone” games that can’t possibly exist. Fly spaceships to different planets, be a bounty hunter, be a cargo freighter, go way out in the wilderness and explore, be a back alley prostitute, get into fist fights, join the navy, run a government. Meanwhile what they’ve made is a marginally Elite: Dangerous without an actual game in it.

Humpback whales are able to navigate exceptionally well and I don’t think science knows how.

Humpback whales travel by picking a direction and traveling in that direction. They can maintain a true course to within a degree of accuracy for hundreds of miles regardless of location on the planet, ocean currents, magnetic variation, day or night, though open empty ocean.

I know how to do that, but I need stuff the whales don’t have like visual reference to a solid surface, accurate charts, radio-based navaids, winds aloft forecasts, and/or gyroscopic instruments. Most of the time, most creatures either navigate by landmarks, some are able to navigate magnetically, some can home, ie they can sense a destination and point their noses at it and go that way, as forces such as winds, ocean currents, Coriolis force etc. push them off course they steer to keep the destination dead ahead, tracing a half-teardrop course.

But humpbacks can pick a direction and go perfectly straight. Somehow.

It just kills me, “Hang on, we’re about to storm the capitol building? Let me not take a shit, put on my fur, horns and makeup real quick. This is gonna make history.”

What a waste of vaginal dryness.

I am a moderator for a community. I haven’t ever had to do any moderating because everyone in there has behaved reasonably.

Well…

Microcomputers had joysticks before they had Microsoft. On the PC platform with the 15 pin game port, a 4 axis (XYZ + throttle) and 8 button plus hat switch form factor arose by the late 90’s such as the Microsoft Sidewinder and Logitech Wingman series. Later models made the transition to USB, there were a couple attempts at force feedback about the time the game industry shifted.

In the early 2000s, flight sims like the Janes series, Microsoft Flight Simulator etc. and other vehicle sim games like Descent and Mechwarrior faded away in favor of first person shooters like Half Life 2 and MMORPGs like World of Warcraft which are best controlled by mouse and keybaord. Interestingly enough, PC games designed for joysticks like Mechwarrior and Crimson Skies moved to consoles to be played with controllers; both saw their final entries on Xbox 360.

Microsoft discontinued the Sidewinder series in 2003. In late 2005 they released a Windows driver for the Xbox 360 controller along with Xinput, making the Xbox 360 controller the de facto standard for a PC game pad. This arrangement has remained more or less intact to the present day, with Microsoft adding support for the Xbox One controller to Windows 10 in 2015, though 360 controller support remains.

tl;dr: The standard issue Xbox controller has been the first party supported gamepad on PC for 20 years.

Logitech produces the cheap Player Two ones you use to pilot billionaire crushing submarines. Valve tried with their original Steam Controller, which was kinda weird and had niche appeal. More recently the likes of Gravis have tried? But the average unwashed mass is going to walk into Best Buy and pick up an Xbox controller, or use the one that he already owns for his Xbox.

As a man, that’s been my experience.

I live in the American Southeast. We generally turn on the air conditioning.

I mean, valid.